Cannes diary part seven: 'Red Road' review

Dave Calhoun gives his opinion on the second British film to screen in competition.

May 22 2006

As Cannes reaches its halfway point, the mood among most critics at this year's festival - including this one - can only be judged as upbeat as the quality of films in the festival's competition has so far been pretty high.

Certainly, there have been some duds, and both of them American - Richard Linklater's annoying 'Fast Food Nation' and Richard Kelly's bloated 'Southland Tales' - but outstanding films from Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan ('Climates'), Spain's Pedro Almodovar ('Volver') and our own Ken Loach ('The Wind that Shakes the Barley') have more than compensated for those wasted few hours spent squirming in the dark as Ethan Hawke becomes a mouth-piece for facile anti-corporatism or The Rock looks totally lost as a tattooed, futuristic Messiah.

The big surprise when the festival's competition line-up was first announced was the inclusion of Andrea Arnold's 'Red Road', a British film and the only debut in competition, yet its screening on Friday night proved that it was worthy of the slot. Arnold - who won an Oscar last year for her short film 'Wasp' - made 'Red Road' as the first instalment in a Zentropa-conceived, Dogme-like, three-film project called 'Advanced Party' that requires three different filmmakers to devise stories from the same pool of characters. So far, 'Red Road' is the only feature to have been completed and it proves that Arnold is one of the more interesting and promising filmmakers to emerge from Britain in recent years.

In 'Red Road', Kate Dickie plays Jackie, a CCTV operator in a tough part of Glasgow who spends her working-hours zooming in and out on the locals as they negotiate the grey pavements and dour landscape of one of Britain's poorest, bleakest corners. Arnold shows great daring in indulging the aesthetic of these security cameras for the first half an hour or so. We spy on strangers as the camera's pixilated images make Glasgow look more sinister than it may already be (here are the first signs of the superior photography from DoP Robbie Ryan that runs throughout the film).

Soon, Jackie spots Clyde (Tony Curran), a recently released prisoner and a figure from her past who we gradually realise has something to do with the husband and the daughter who Jackie lost some years back. An ambiguous relationship forms between the two, first tentative, then sexual. It's tense stuff that plays smartly with our perceptions, in turn both allying us with and alienating us from those we are watching on the screen.

Some plot points and character traits don't entirely convince, and there's something of a too warm, too neat ending that suggests over-zealous script development, but overall Arnold delivers a chilling mood piece that makes good use of all-round impressive performances and some haunting locations.

Less of a pleasure was Aki Kaurismaki's 'Lights in the Dusk' - a concise piece that tells of Koistinen (Janne Hyytiainen), a Helsinki security-guard, who may qualify for the top award for life's most unfortunate loser. When the door to a bar swings open, he's the sad fool standing behind it. When he applies for a business loan, the bank manager asks if he's joking. When he's set up to commit a jewellery robbery, it's at the hands of a vicious femme fatale and it lands him in prison. Kaurismaki presents all this in less than 80 minutes of near-silence.

The dour mood and the dark aesthetic, marked by shadowy lighting and long faces all round, is familiar from Kaurismaki's other films. But 'Lights in the Dusk' is somehow less rewarding than 'Drifting Clouds' or 'Man Without A Past', the earlier two films in this loose trilogy, largely because Koistinen is such a passive, faceless character that it's hard to consider him at all.

It's a deeply nihilist work, a study in failure and misfortune that suggests that if you're at the bottom of the heap then you'll most likely stay there and suffer. Thank god for the one, small sign of hope that marks the film's end.

To read Time Out's 'Red Road' set visit, click here.

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