Red Road
STARRING Kate Dickie, Tony Curran and Martin Compston,
Written and Directed by Andrea Arnold
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Like most films worth watching, Red Road doesn’t fit neatly into any genre. It’s a Dogma project, originating in an idea by Anders Thomas Jensen (Green Butchers) and Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners), but shot by a Scotswoman with her roots in the kitchen-sink realism school of cinema (Ken Loach, Mike Leigh). It and deals with a twilight world of closed-circuit TV surveillance, a ubiquitous and somewhat Orwellian tool of law and order in the U.K.
It’s not exactly a thriller, more of a confuser. The greatest mystery for a North American audience is simply figuring out what’s going on – with equal measures of obfuscation supplied by grainy CCTV footage, thick local accents and a fragmented storyline. Another element contributing to the surreal atmosphere is the eponymous building, Glasgow’s Red Road housing estate. It’s a monumental edifice glowing in perpetual twilight as surveillance operative Jackie slips into the obsessive orbit of Clyde, a young man spotted on one of her cameras. The subtle interplay of various degrees of video resolution, the murky plot and the dream-like pacing provide some startling parallels to David Lynch’s most recent nightmare. However, Red Road doesn’t slip into the supernatural, and does eventually resolve itself into a recognizable story, and a surprisingly positive ending.
Red Road is a fine example of the new European "women’s cinema," with a strong central female character portrayed in a thoroughly uncompromising and original manner, devoid of visual or political clichés and platitudes. Like most European art films, however, this can be heavy going – no exposition speeches are given, or other concessions made to short attention spans – and will separate the film lovers from the film goers. |
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