Red Road

I saw "Red Road" at Cannes, and it was my pick as best film almost to the end, beaten out only by "Pan's Labyrinth". The film keeps you off balance throughout because you are not told what to think of events; they simply unfold without explanation until the events themselves necessitate dialogue between the two main characters. Not knowing becomes rather vexing because you are always trying to figure out why the protagonist does so much that you feel is wrong, but it's all just part of the fun. And the kind of storytelling I enjoy most. It reminded me of "Exotica", another film I loved. Too, the faces of the actors are relatively unfamiliar which adds to the mystery, since they carry no "baggage" from previous films to the characters.

There doesn't seem to be a distributor connected to this movie yet, and we'd really lose out if it doesn't get to the U. S. To the reviewer who gave away the plot, you are an ass.

The movie is beautifully shot but is so slow moving in the beginning that it might turn some viewers off. However, if you can bear with it, the last forty minutes are brilliant. The portrayal of a broken-hearted woman and her desperation for vengeance isn't of the stereotypical sort. Instead the audience is never really clued in to exactly what her motivations are, just that she has a reason. The twist and reveal are handled with deft emotion. The character of Clyde is an interesting one because you never really get a handle on him till the final moments of the film. It is the emotion of the film that makes the audience hold on until the very last moments, though the sex doesn't hurt either. Until it does, of course.

This movie is a slow but engaging film about loss, guilt, and urban life in Scotland. I found it intriguing to watch the lives of lower class people in Scotland and its unglamorised portrayal of daily existence in high rise apartment blocks. Messy flats, shitty greasy spoon diners, laundromats, housing blocks with no frills, no trees, just like the real thing.

The surveillance camera cop was interesting in itself, but the story was almost a bit part player in this film. yes it was interesting and the way it was unveiled without giving away any details before you absolutely had to know them was well paced.

But the characters were the most interesting thing, This is bleak, modern, urban life, real and uncompromising. Not overly ugly, just raw and real, and interesting.

I saw the North American premiere of Red Road on Sept 14, 2006 at the Isabel Bader Theatre during the Toronto International Film Festival.

This was extremely well made for a first time feature and the story line packed quite a few wallops on the way. It is a slow build up so just be patient, there'll be plenty of shocks to come and it is quite a while before all the pieces fall into place.

It was a very original idea and story by Andrea Arnold using the characters imposed on her by the limitations of a new Dogme-like film rule called Advance Party. 2 more films are set to come using the same lead characters and actors but in entirely different contexts. All of them must take place in Scotland according to the rules.

Director Andrea Arnold was there for the North American premiere and led a lively and humorous Q&A at the end that included the somewhat chilling statistics that the UK has over 4 million CCTVs or 1 for every 14 people and that overall they have 20% of the CCTVs in operation on the entire planet.

• A female cctv operative discovers in the course of her work that a criminal has been released from jail early for good behaviour. She takes a very personal interest in him..-

That rare thing. A superb British movie. Set in an unremittingly bleak Glasgow focused on a multi-storey housing estate in the East End of that city, this is NOT the usual kitchen-sink or slice-of-life telly-style drama that nearly always make a disheartening prospect for cinema-going. This is a complex character-driven piece, beautifully shot and edited. Scenes are allowed space and time to breathe in their own life. It never tells the audience what to think, how to feel, or even what's going on. Yet ultimately the movie tells of a struggle against loss and grief and there is a redemptive quality which is hard-won by the director. The surveillance aspect is brilliantly handled by mixing in low-res grainy footage of surveyed scenes scanning and zooming in on actual streets (and some of the locals) and allowing the audience to figure out what is going on along with the operative. It suggested a knee-jerk parallel with Haneke's Cache (Hidden), but this a completely different take more closely paralleling Coppola's 'The Conversation' and suggesting that the effects of surveillance may be more acutely felt by the observer than the observed. The acting by the entire cast is pitch-perfect. The highly explicit sex scene is, for once, completely warranted and the sexual tension in the relationship is reminiscent of Roeg's 'Bad Timing'. But this is a film which gains a lot of power by being deeply-rooted in its time and place and doesn't need to look back. Utterly assured and contemporary, like 'Morvern Callar', it is very much what is happening NOW. And whenever the journalistic blah about a boom in Scottish film inevitably subsides, the country will be left with something more potent than bloody 'Gregory's Girl' as a benchmark for what can be achieved with a small-scale budget and Scottish/Scotland-based directors.