| Jen fights cosmetic enhancement rumours JENNIFER Hawkins has again batted off rumours that she has been dabbling in cosmetic enhancement. news.com.au |
Social deprivation in Britain: how a writer's life turned to tragedy | Madeleine Bunting A film about Andrea Dunbar and her daughter calls for a better understanding of the devastating effects of social changeThere was a painfully poignant moment on the Buttershaw estate in Bradford yesterday when a blue plaque to mark the life of playwright Andrea Dunbar was erected on the council house where she lived until her death at the age of 29 in 1990. Most famous for her play Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982), which was later adapted for the cinema, she was characterised as a writer who exposed the fallout of Thatcherism on the English working class.The blue plaque was accompanied by the first public screening in the city of a new film, The Arbor, which traces the life of Dunbar and her eldest daughter Lorraine, now 29. Every decade since 1980, when Dunbar's first play was produced, the story of this family has been represented either on stage or in film. Every time, the portrayal of violence, addiction and broken lives has prompted as much controversy as admiration. This most recent production, by the film-maker Clio Barnard, is as much about how the story has been told as it is about its most recent tragic chapter.Three generations of this one family offer in microcosm a story of social change in Britain and its impact on a deprived working-class community. It's these wider implications that have prompted a screening in the House of Lords to be attended by, among others, Iain Duncan Smith, before it appears at the London Film Festival later this week. Dunbar's work was about domestic violence, alcoholism and underage sex; when theatre director Max Stafford-Clark returned with playwright Robin Soans to revisit Buttershaw in 2000, they picked up on the ravages caused by cheap heroin, addiction and prostitution. The latest instalment takes the family's story into the greatest tragedy of all: the death of Lorraine's two year-old baby son from a methadone overdose and his mother's subsequent imprisonment.It is an unbearably bleak film to watch. When challenged on this point, Barnard quotes the film-maker Michael Haneke's idea that we go to the cinema expecting to be reassured. She has absolutely refused to conform; indeed, she has provided a film which creates a desperate need for reassurance. You stagger out feeling emotionally battered, and the haunting phrases and expressions of the film lurk in the memory for days.It is all in sharp contrast to what has become a staple of British cinema β the cheerful, plucky English working classes as depicted most recently in Made in Dagenham. These are films that play to all the heartwarming stereotypes: hearts of gold, rough diamonds, strong communities and loyalty are mixed with a large measure of ribald humour. It's a recipe that has ensured that a generation has understood the savage history of British deindustrialisation and conflict-prone labour relations through the prism of films such as Billy Elliot and The Full Monty. Part of the success of Made in Dagenham is to add the stylish celebratory twist of the arrival of working class consumerism β TV, white goods on hire purchase and plenty of 1960s fashion. The Dunbar family history knocks each of these tropes down like so many skittle pins in the bowling alley.Both Dunbar's plays and Barnard's new film are about the failure of intimate relationships, and neither refer to the backstory of the decline of the Bradford textile industry β in which both Dunbar's parents originally worked β nor the rising levels of worklessness in the early 1980s. This is a puzzling omission because here is a chastening demonstration of what happens to the social fabric of a community when its employment patterns collapse. It doesn't lead necessarily to the determination and resourcefulness of The Full Monty, but to a bitter turning inwards, destructive of self and intimates, and to alcoholism and domestic violence.It was from this unlikely background that Dunbar's remarkable writing talents emerged and, nurtured by Stafford-Clark, proved a critical success at the Royal Court. But in a bitter inversion of the Billy Elliot-style account of one talented kid who manages to break free of his disintegrating community to achieve social mobility, Dunbar couldn't or didn't want to leave the family networks of Buttershaw, and found the theatre world she'd stumbled into critical and demanding. She turned to drink, failed to develop stable relationships and died alone in a pub as the result of a brain haemorrhage. Individual talent proved insufficient to transport her from one set of life chances into another; a reminder that social mobility is as often a cruel tale of exile and loss as it is of rags to riches.But if two generations of tragedy were not enough, it is Dunbar's daughter Lorraine's story that leaves one speechless. Her father beat her mother; the first 18 months of her life were spent in a refuge for battered women; her childhood memories are dominated by her mother's alcoholism and death and by sexual abuse. By 11 she had lost her mother, by 14 she had found heroin and prostitution. Of her several prison sentences, she comments that prison is the only place where she has ever felt safe.The chances she had to create a stable life for herself were infinitesimally small, and hers is a crucially important story to hear at a time when the coalition government is briskly setting up sharp distinctions between the deserving and the undeserving poor. Look in detail into the lives of people such as Lorraine, and the falsity of such distinctions is apparent: how can difficult, tragic lives be sorted into banal and subjective categories? And what about the brutal consequences for the children of parents deemed to be "undeserving"?But the main political purpose of Barnard's film is more subtle. This is a story of tragedy, of inter-generational cycles of neglect and abuse, but Barnard scrupulously avoids apportioning blame. There were exemplary neighbours who did all they could to support Lorraine and her siblings. There is no finger-pointing at social services, no blame targeted at the many state agencies that have invested in Buttershaw's regeneration in the last 15 years. The neighbourhood is much more prosperous today, though, significantly, the increased material wealth has not helped ease social problems such as addiction.Blame is the mechanism with which we deal with tragedy; if so-and-so had done X, Y wouldn't have happened. It may offer an easy narrative structure for journalists, but blame is an impatient response, points out Barnard, which "is too easy, and it doesn't help". What she wanted above all was for the audience to stop judging and just listen to what neglect feels like, and what its consequences are. She uses clever techniques to disrupt the ways we assess people β there are documentary-style interviews but with actors lip-synching real voices, so we can't judge by the look of the person and we are left uncertain about what is true and what is not.Her real target is not the failures of the state β which is usually blamed in cases of children dying from abuse β but the broader failure of understanding. Just as actual witch-hunts were never an effective way to deal with lonely elderly women, orgies of blame and disgust towards parents who abuse or those charged to intervene will not save a single child's life.The Arbor goes on general release on 22 OctoberTheatrePovertyDramaMadeleine Buntingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Peter Mullan's Neds heads London film festival's most-awaited list The Scottish virtuoso makes a welcome return after eight years but a remastered David Lean classic is stealing the spotlightThis year's London film festival saw the most keenly anticipated comeback in British cinema β perhaps only the next movie by Lynne Ramsay is as impatiently awaited. Peter Mullan is the Scottish film-maker and actor whose 1997 debut picture, Orphans, was a film of intestine-tangling emotional power. Following that, The Magdalene Sisters β about the institutionalised abuse in Ireland's notorious Magdalene laundries β was a tremendous triumph, winning the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival and confirming Mullan as a directorial heavyweight.That was back in 2002. Since then, his admirers have been left wondering when his next film would arrive, with Mullan reportedly experienced some frustration getting backing for the films he wanted to make. In the meantime, he gave some great acting performances in works such as 2006's Children Of Men and the Red Riding TV trilogy, which screened in 2009.Now the wait is over: his new film, Neds ("non-educated delinquents"), is a film about growing up in 70s Glasgow; a coming-of-age tale that pours out of the screen in a number of emotional and narrative directions β perhaps the result of Mullan's pent-up frustration. It has muscular force, freewheeling energy and is by turns funny, tragic and scary, starting out resembling Distant Voices, Still Lives or the opening of Kes and drifting towards the menace of A Clockwork Orange. Yet I felt that Mullan had so much he wanted to say and so many ways to say it, and felt so deeply, variously, and personally about his story, that it left the film a little baggy and undisciplined. Much though I appreciated Neds, I felt that it could have had more structure, particularly in the final half-hour when it lost some shape and focus.Conor McCarron plays John McGill, a smart and hard-working boy in a tough Glasgow school who shows every sign of making it to university. His dad β played in cameo by Mullan himself β is an abusive drunk and his eldest brother a tearaway, involved in gangs and perpetually in trouble with the police. Miraculously, John looks like he's going to escape the quagmire of despair that pulls down the men of his family. But then something awful happens: a friendship with a middle-class boy sours, and sensitive, intelligent John feels the class slight far more keenly than most. A switch flips inside him, and Mullan cleverly shows that when a formidable and intelligent young man like John goes to the bad he will do so in a more spectacular way than your common-or-garden no-goodnik.Mullan's school scenes are all terrific, showing how the casual use of the strap to punish the most minor wrongdoing brutalises and degrades everyone. There is a superb cameo by Gary Lewis as a particularly intimidating schoolmaster β his presence brought Alistair Gray's Lanark into my mind β and a scene in which he deliberately embarrasses latecomers which is so toe-curlingly horrible I'd bet anything it's taken from Mullan's own experiences. A scene at a youth-club disco, in which the boys are seen soundlessly passing word among themselves that an almighty punch-up is in the offing, reprises the famous sequence in The Magdalene Sisters when news of a sexual assault is passed on through whispers among wedding guests.As the film goes on, it drifts into the arena of melodrama. An hallucinatory encounter with the crucified Christ brings John close to his own crisis and a Freudian confrontation with his hated father β who has not, after all, managed to be a very important figure in the rest of the film. To my mind, there's something a little bizarre and strained in these elements, although they may well be taken directly from real life.What comes across with Neds is its sheer energy and punch. There is a moment when one lad, hanging out in a desolate playground, furiously lashes at a swing which spins around and around over its horizontal bar until its bunched up at the top β a potent image for the general rage and frustration. Mullan's final shot, meanwhile, is a masterpiece of surreal strangeness. Flawed though it may be, Neds has distinctive power and I look forward to revisiting it when it goes on general release.It's certainly a whole lot better than the deeply disappointing It's Kind of a Funny Story by writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who made the well-regarded Half Nelson. This is an indie comedy that seems dead set on repeating every dishonest movie cliche about psychiatric hospitals. Keir Gilchrist plays Craig, a quirky mixed-up teen who checks himself into a New York City mental health unit after threatening to commit suicide and within five days inside has acquired a quirky, redemptively sacrificial best friend (Zach Galifianakis) and a beautiful girlfriend (Emma Roberts) β who picturesquely cuts herself, although not in any way that spoils that lovely face. The reason for her self-harm finally remains unexplored. What a waste of time.The most enjoyable film at the festival might well be a revival β the painstaking digital restoration of David Lean's 1957 classic The Bridge on the River Kwai, which has the superb speech, courtesy of Sessue Hayakawa's Colonel Saito: "I hate the British! You're defeated but you have no shame! You're stubborn but you have no pride! You endure but you have no courage!" This film can now be appreciated not merely as a ripping, gripping yarn but as a satirical insight into the British experience of defeat, both in the war and the years after it.Saito is the second world war commander of the Japanese jungle work camp and in charge of extending the Bangkok-Rangoon rail link across the Kwai using a labour force of conquered and humiliated British POWs. He has demanded their officers do demeaning manual work alongside other ranks but Colonel Nicholson, incomparably played by Alec Guinness, has refused β despite being banged up in a furnace-like "punishment hut". Exasperated by Nicholson's intransigence and stiff-upper-lip martyrdom, by the subsequent slow work on the bridge by his demoralised subordinates (which will get the Japanese commander into desperate trouble) and by his opposite number's refusal to accept that, in surrendering, the British have no rights to any human dignity at all, Saito finally gives in β and Nicholson's strange volte-face begins.Having secured the military principle of caste privilege, he is determined to show British superiority in engineering and administration. Nicholson throws himself with increasing passion into creating the best bridge these Japs have ever seen, unable to see how his masterpiece is an act of betrayal. Bridge-building gradually becomes a chilling symbol of collaboration with the enemy. William Holden plays Shears, the roguish American who escapes but is induced by Major Warden (played by Jack Hawkins) to join his commando expedition bidding to dynamite the bridge. Both Holden and Hawkins got superior billing, but this is Alec Guinness's film through and through: his thin, agonised face, as austere as a medieval saint's, burns out of the screen.The sweep and flair of this film are tremendous, and Lean creates an epic feel with terrifically photographed exterior locations. But with over 50 years' insight we can also see how the director was offering a somewhat tactless, subversive satire. For years I have been hearing it glibly described as an "anti-war film'' β which it is. But things are complicated than that.The career of Colonel Nicholson, somehow going the opposite of native in the relentless sun, is a cousin to Lean's TE Lawrence and also a reminder of an aspect of Britain's second world war history that tends to be passed over. Some fantasise about what would have happened if Britain had surrendered to Germany β the duke of Windsor installed as king? Mosley as prime minister? Our civil service induced to begin the painful, regrettable business of rounding up Jews? Unthinkable! However, Lean is reminding us that, despite our stirring Churchillian myths of never surrendering, in the far east the British did raise the white flag to an axis power.The Bridge on the River Kwai is a parable of PΓ©tain-esque collaboration, demonstrating how we British might well salvage a bad situation by showing our masters we could make a triumphant job of submission and self-abasement. Perhaps Nicholson's awful situation spoke to Britain's sinking sense of defeat in the late 50s, with the nation progressively deprived of that empire which afforded his men their compromising chance to build bridges. The catchy Colonel Bogey march, whistled by the British POWs, may well have inspired Elmer Bernstein's theme for The Great Escape in 1963 β a much less challenging and disquieting film with a more palatable take on defiance.Guinness's final "What have I done?" as he staggers woozily up to the dynamite-plunger while the train chugs towards the river-crossing is the nailbiter to end all nailbiters. The Bridge on the River Kwai is a true classic: superbly conceived, photographed and acted, and a rich, narrative pleasure. It is a fitting addition to Britain's largest celebration of global cinematic achievement.London film festivalPeter Bradshawguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Matt Damon's wife gives birth to another daughter By 2010-10-24T15:40:29ZNEW YORK (AP) -- It's another girl for Matt Damon and his wife.... hosted.ap.org |
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown In the small but rapidly growing universe of Broadway musicals-based-on-movies, I don't think I've ever seen a more faithful adaptation than this one. feedproxy.google.com |