Britain on Film - The Reality Gap
The Continued Absence of Honesty in Contemporary British Cinema
Oct 28, 2008
This last week saw the limited stateside release of Paul Andrew Williams’ London to Brighton, a gritty urban crime thriller that seeks to restore a long lost ingredient to the recipe of traditional British cinema – a Britain that’s actually vaguely realistic for a change. The fact that the lead characters are a prostitute and her perusing pimp is frankly irrelevant. They could easily be any working class man and woman in Britain today.
Poorly educated, under skilled and reflexively confrontational, they act out of an unjustifiable sense of self-entitlement that is indicative of a waning society of the down slope of pretty much everything. Williams’ vision of a Britain engulfed in stagnation, grinding poverty and bleak desperation is a genuinely honest summation of matters in a country whose capacity for self-deception on screen is mind-boggling.
The British film industry struggles to find an international audience
It's been a long hard slog for the British film industry. Back in the mid nineties Film Four’s production arm was on the verge of collapse, Hugh Grant was our biggest export and everybody was convinced Britain’s most talented filmmaker was a former heroin addict from Scotland.
These wilderness years did have the odd spike of success. The Full Monty argued the idea that when faced with a cash flow problem, a group of unemployed likely lads from Sheffield would turn to stripping to solve their worries. Of course they would. Guy Ritchie then set us all back 10 years, bringing ideas to a standstill and spawning a thousand imitators, all eager to recreate his over-stylized world of the English “gang-star.”
The aforementioned Mr. Grant melted middle-aged women’s hearts everywhere as the stammering, floppy haired face of English men. While representing radically different genres, these pillars of British film in the nineties all shared one common characteristic that is still ever-present in today – they all depict a Britain that is a complete and total fantasy.
Depiction of British youth and schools is a fallacy
Make no mistake Britain is a slum. Britain is stale, Britain is ignorant and Britain is an island suffocating on its own decadence. Yet the British film remains anchored to a sanitized, inoffensive portrayal of middle-class conservative values that simply do not exist any more outside of Richard Curtis’ mind. In fact the most realistic thing Hugh Grant ever did, in terms of accurately portraying the average 30-something British male, took place in the backseat of a car on Sunset Boulevard.
Across the country education standards are falling dramatically. Yet try and find a recent British film set in a contemporary school and chances are you cannot. What you will find are reasonably successful exports like Starter for Ten and the screen adaptation of stage play The History Boys. Both films tell stories of cultured, educated youths who are eager to learn, and both just happen to also be set twenty years ago. These films, nice as they are, have about as much in common with the classrooms of today as Snapes’ potions class at Hogwarts.
The History Boys chronicles the coming-of-age enlightenment of a group of sixth formers who study for the entrance exams for Oxford. How about a film showing that since the government abolished student grants children now go where their parents can afford to send them if they can afford to go anywhere at all?
Self-awareness is the key to success
Flipping over a society with a long standing international image and exposing its dark underbelly of less flattering social and cultural realities can be a gold mine for riveting, vibrant cinema. See the likes of City of God and La Haine for just two textbook examples of what can happen when a filmmaker takes an honest and unflinching look at the contemporary problems of their country. Yet whenever a filmmaker depicts Britain in a state of social turmoil or moral and cultural decline, it is always cushioned with an element of temporal displacement. The decrepit and dilapidated Britain is always either a Britain of the far off future, as in Children of Men, or a Britain of the distant past like This is England.
Credit where credit is due, one or two filmmakers admirably made brave attempts to showcase an honest Britain set in the realm of the now. Gary Oldman’s directorial debut, the 1997 film Nil by Mouth, starring a monstrous Ray Winstone, was a nasty and uncomfortable slice of working class life centered on alcoholism and domestic abuse. It was brutally authentic, startlingly close to home, and it was seen by absolutely nobody. A few years later Stephen Frears gave us a reality check on the state of illegal immigration with Dirty Pretty Things, a film that highlighted the plight of illegal immigrants living in England, indicting many foreigners but somehow giving a pass to a rather crucial part of the equation – the English. Prior to that the closest we came to discussing an issue like immigration was Bend it Like Beckham.
Turning to a new generation of filmmakers
With the plethora of British talent available you would think that someone would take that brave step and champion a project that isn’t afraid to reject the established fantasy and show Britain for the lost and troubled nation it really is. But you have a feeling that if they did they would quickly run into the roadblock of commercial viability, specifically the lack of it. As Gus Van Sant can attest to, there is simply no American market for white kids shooting other white kids.
More likely it is going to take an unknown quantity like Paul Andrew Williams to drag the real Britain kicking and screaming into the cold light of day for the world to see. A brave filmmaker not afraid to tell us that the emperor has no clothes and take a gamble on the idea that authenticity is perhaps more important to art than what’s safe, comfortable and easy to market.
