uncle david - review

David Hoyle and The Avant Garde Alliance's Uncle David is a film that makes you believe cinema can still produce intelligent and challenging work.

The film is familiar - atavistic according to my original notes - while being unexpected.

Familiar because the music sounds like songs you already know. Familiar because it looks like the kind of film that Channel Four might have funded, or BBC Two might have screened (late at night) 25 years ago.

Atavistic because the locations seem resolutely British. Atavistic because much of the action seems to grow out of harsh folk myths and ancient ritual practices. Atavistic because at times the characters are like inscrutable revenants of a older time.

I'll come to the unexpected later.

The film is funny at times. Or Uncle David himself (David Hoyle) is funny. At least until the point you start to feel queasy about him. And even after that point despite yourself.

The film feels a little awkward when it starts. Initially the performances are stiff. That rapidly changes. You are drawn into the film - in part by David Hoyle's compelling presence - and the performances become more natural even as the situation grows more disturbing.

The film and the story it tells are intelligent and complicated. You are never told what to think or feel. The characters are not obviously and simplistically good or bad. The film certainly never takes moral positions. 

If I wanted to be mischievous - and I wanted to miss the point and settle for a single interpretation of the film - I might read Uncle David as David Cameron and the coalition government, and Ashley (Ashley Ryder) as the UK, public services and the working class.

But that would badly miss the point. The film doesn't have a single meaning or interpretation. Neither character is reducible to being good or bad, innocent or cynical, and never crudely symbolic. Rather they variously contain none, some and all of these characteristics at different times.

The filmmakers trust you. They trust you to watch the film and make up your own mind.

This is where the performances are so good. They have a light touch and portray real, complex, contradictory human beings who exist in relationship to the world around them and in relationship to one another. They are not reductive 'types'. They don't exist to perform particular narrative roles.

Each character is complex in different ways. Uncle David, after initially seeming like a version of David Hoyle's stage persona, becomes much more troubling. Although he delivers the majority of the dialogue - often very funny and sympathetic - he remains removed from us. Unreadable, inscrutable, his real thoughts and motivations obscure even after the film has finished.

Has this happened before? Will it happen again? Does Uncle David really hope to achieve what he suggests? What drives him? What does he do after the film ends? Is he even real? Is he a dream of Ashley's, or is Ashley dreamt by him?

Ashley seems innocent to the point of being arrested. Is he mentally challenged? Is he perhaps meant to represent a child, but played by an adult? It doesn't appear to be the case. Perhaps he's been abused and dominated most of his life. These are almost credible explanations. Except - for one thing - he's obviously smarter than he appears.

He's blank in a different way than Uncle David. Uncle David's blankness verges on the sinister at times, Ashley's blankness is even harder to read. How much is it a method of control? How much a way to protect himself? How far does he really understand and collude with what happens? Even if he understands and colludes with it, more interestingly, how far does he believe in it?

We are after all thrown into the middle of a relationship that might have been going on for a long time, and which certainly has its own rituals and rules. A hermetic and quotidian relationship. A relationship where it's hard to read where the power lies - if there is an imbalance of power.

I'd like to revisit some of my earlier themes in a little more detail.

Familiarity. The filmic echoes include Derek Jarman and Andrew Kötting - for the way they capture England on film as much as anything, and Kenneth Anger - for less easily definable reasons. The musical echoes are of the early 1970s. And in what some have called the 'transgressive' nature of the film there are hints of William Burroughs.

But. The film is not just borrowed clothes and tropes. It is defiantly its own creation.

I feel that a major function of art is to explore the complexity of the world, our human reactions to that, and the further complexity of our relationships. Much of this is unmeasurable, intangible. For me that puts art at war - not with science, which it complements and which explores the tangible and measurable - but with religion.

Religion seems to come from the same sense of awe at the universe around us, from the same finding of abstract value in objects, events and people. But while art remains flexible and open, religion is institutional, unimaginative, and interested more in control than freedom.

If the film embodies any values it seems to side with art and imagination against religion and other institutionalised method of control. But this is not the only theme, or the predominant theme in the film.

However, there is a broadside against religion, and a couple of moments that play with religious and ritual imagery. Ashley is described as looking like the crucified Jesus. One piece of ritual imagery leads to the next theme...

Atavism. A shallow channel like a grave, like the rock-cut graves at Heysham is dug in the sand. Inhumation is a common ritual and not necessarily religious.

The Isle of Sheppey where the film takes place seems cold, even when Ashley is seen wearing only tiny trunks. You get a sense - as with parts of Kötting's Gallivant, and Jarman's footage of Dungeness - of Britain as a cold rock at the edge of the Atlantic, on the fringe of Europe.

The people other than Uncle David and Ashley exist not quite outside the frame of the film, but not quite within it. They are like lost tribes who wandered here from Europe and were either cut off or forgot how to return. They eat breakfast, play gambling machines, fly remote-control planes and drive past in the background.

Ashley is childlike. He plays in the bath, he plays on a slide, he makes sandcastles.

The unexpected. You know early on what will happen at the end of the film - though not precisely how. This, the familiarity and atavism, and the initial similarities of Uncle David and David Hoyle may lead you to think you know what you're getting. And in a superficial way you do.

But the film progresses in unexpected ways. The film is a linear narrative, but the narrative is barely there, and in many ways irrelevant.

There are long takes - sometimes mainly quiet, sometimes mainly talky, sometimes more balanced.

There are musical interludes - where the film stops and for two, three minutes the action is cut to a song. One such interlude suspends the narrative as the characters walk past an amusement arcade - though itself is interrupted by moments of dialogue. Another such interlude montages the characters dancing and David putting make-up on Ashley - gradually progressing the narrative.

Funny. Throughout the film Uncle David has speeches - rants if you like - with which you sympathise even though you may be uneasy about where it's leading. Most of these are funny at different points. He also has throwaway lines that make you laugh.

But the humour isn't just verbal. It's visual too. During the montage of the characters dancing the tv behind Uncle David appears to by playing one of Ashley (the actor's) hardcore gay porn DVDs.

Other visual gags [blowjob pun intended] are more conventional. So at breakfast in a diner the characters have a seemingly out of place candelabra with black candles. This turns out to have been brought by Uncle David. It also appears that he brought a tablecloth that gets left behind - no other table has one.

Elsewhere, as I already mentioned, people fly remote control planes in the background of an emotionally intense conversation between Uncle David and Ashley.

Less obviously there's a mundanity of circumstance and location - and arguably of the aspiration of people around Uncle David and Ashley - that contrasts with the ambition of the characters' plans. This is funny and somehow accomplished without ever toppling one way into tragedy or another into bathos.

Complexity. I've mentioned complexity a couple of times. The narrative isn't complex. The filming and the editing aren't especially complex - though there were moments when I thought the sound design was really excellent. The complexity is human. It's the complexity of relationships, the complexity of ideas.

To me it indicates that the filmmakers respect and trust their audience. They refuse to be condescending. This is properly grown-up filmmaking.

In conclusion I honestly don't give a fuck whether you like the film or not - although I'd like to see it make profit, if only to enable more of the same.

If you have problems with cheap or rough looking movies you probably won't enjoy it. If you have problems with awkward performances then you won't get past the first ten minutes - although trust me, they improve. If you like a strong or convoluted narrative you'll be disappointed. If you like relatively transparent characters you'll be frustrated.

I think it's fucking great.