Bait. (15.)
Directed by Mark Jenkin.
Starring Ed Rowe, Mary Woodvine, Giles Smith, Simon Shepherd. Black & white. Available to stream from Curzon Home Cinema and BFI Player. 89 mins.
On Tuesday 31st at 8.30 Curzon Home Cinema will be hosting a live Q&A with director Jenkin, hosted by Mark Kermode. The idea is watch the film from 7.00 to get the authentic big-night-out-at-the-cinema experience.
Misery may love company but not as much as British cinema loves misery. (Company it can take or leave.) So it's no wonder that Jenkin's lo-fi debut feature was the most lauded homegrown feature of last year: it came up with an aesthetic that encompasses the length and breadth of this nation's history of celluloid gloom and gave it contemporary relevance.
The location is a Cornish fishing village that no longer fishes. Like the rest of the nation, it has been enslaved to the service industry: a summertime infestation of posh townies who have bought up all the most scenic local property. Burly Mark (Rowe) despises his brother for using the family boat for sightseeing trips and is heading for a confrontation with the middle-class couple (Woodvine & Shepherd) who bought their family home and turned it into a B&B.
There's nothing too remarkable about the situation but the magic is in how Jenkin films it: using a hand-cranked 16mm Bolex camera and monochrome Kodak stock that the director then hand processed. All sound had to be recorded separately. The result is a grainy, scratchy, boxy 4:3 image that recalls our heritage of social realist drama, Look at Britain documentaries and a whole raft of avant-garde experimental filmmakers, most obviously Derek Jarman.
The application of such a stubbornly outmoded method and amateurish look to a dramatisation of contemporary faultlines surrounding the B-word does, of course, make for a perfect metaphor. The medium really is the message. That just leaves the question of whether having come up with a killer visual pun, Jenkin has anywhere interesting to go with it and the answer is sort of. The editing is heavy on foreshadowing but the narrative doesn't go quite where you expect it to. It's a limited experience, but effective and Jenkin has enough guile to avoid it all becoming too thuddingly obvious.
The final irony is that the film will be viewed almost exclusively by the metropolitan elite and ignored by salt-of-the-earth artisans it celebrates, who wouldn't pay good money to watch something that looks cheap and old.
Directed by Mark Jenkin.
Starring Ed Rowe, Mary Woodvine, Giles Smith, Simon Shepherd. Black & white. Available to stream from Curzon Home Cinema and BFI Player. 89 mins.
On Tuesday 31st at 8.30 Curzon Home Cinema will be hosting a live Q&A with director Jenkin, hosted by Mark Kermode. The idea is watch the film from 7.00 to get the authentic big-night-out-at-the-cinema experience.
Misery may love company but not as much as British cinema loves misery. (Company it can take or leave.) So it's no wonder that Jenkin's lo-fi debut feature was the most lauded homegrown feature of last year: it came up with an aesthetic that encompasses the length and breadth of this nation's history of celluloid gloom and gave it contemporary relevance.
The location is a Cornish fishing village that no longer fishes. Like the rest of the nation, it has been enslaved to the service industry: a summertime infestation of posh townies who have bought up all the most scenic local property. Burly Mark (Rowe) despises his brother for using the family boat for sightseeing trips and is heading for a confrontation with the middle-class couple (Woodvine & Shepherd) who bought their family home and turned it into a B&B.
There's nothing too remarkable about the situation but the magic is in how Jenkin films it: using a hand-cranked 16mm Bolex camera and monochrome Kodak stock that the director then hand processed. All sound had to be recorded separately. The result is a grainy, scratchy, boxy 4:3 image that recalls our heritage of social realist drama, Look at Britain documentaries and a whole raft of avant-garde experimental filmmakers, most obviously Derek Jarman.
The application of such a stubbornly outmoded method and amateurish look to a dramatisation of contemporary faultlines surrounding the B-word does, of course, make for a perfect metaphor. The medium really is the message. That just leaves the question of whether having come up with a killer visual pun, Jenkin has anywhere interesting to go with it and the answer is sort of. The editing is heavy on foreshadowing but the narrative doesn't go quite where you expect it to. It's a limited experience, but effective and Jenkin has enough guile to avoid it all becoming too thuddingly obvious.
The final irony is that the film will be viewed almost exclusively by the metropolitan elite and ignored by salt-of-the-earth artisans it celebrates, who wouldn't pay good money to watch something that looks cheap and old.
