Red Road

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.

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.

I saw the trailer of this a few weeks ago and some of the mysterious and bleak nature of the shorts clips prompted that little voice inside me, saying " you won't be comfortable with it, but see it." I wasn't and I did.

The plot unravels slowly with little hints as to its central theme dotted about sensitively. It has you asking the question, what has happened to Jackie? How does this figure Clyde she has recognised and recoiled from on the CCTV monitors at work impacted on her lonely and monochrome life ? The answers come quite slowly as she puts her head into the lion's jaws of proximity to this danger man. A bit like the pantomime responses I felt like saying, " No, don't go any closer,he's behind you; you'll be recognised.", failing to recognise myself that something in her wants exactly that. In fact she receives from him perversely, what no viewer might possibly expect, but then she has us asking, is this payback time ? I'm not telling you, see the film ! The unfinished business Jackie has with Clyde is what this film is about.

The raw,down-at-heel, desperate, littered, high rise and windy Glasgow streets and housing estates as the backdrop. Ordinary everyday people get on with their lives oblivious of the drama being enacted in Jackie's life and culminating in an protracted showdown. But this is not the end. No, for all the unresolved grief, anger, erotic fascination and damaged lives, there remains a hope born of the unlikely. The film leads you away from the possibility, but ultimately there is life after death in Red Road. No cheering music soundtrack intrudes to romanticise what cannot possibly yield to only to the mawkish. There is just silence, sounds of the street, machinery, public transport and some well chosen tracks to create mood when required. This is what the vintage among us identify as continental cinema, no wonder they loved it at Cannes. This is not a film for audiences to remain detached from; the sheer intimacy of the camera work and the evolving personal destinies involved get you involved too, uncomfortably. A home grown vignette of humanity wrestling with the s..t that regularly happens !

The slowly unravelling character and background of a CCTV operator form the plot of this gripping and unsettling, low-budget, yet very professionally made film. Jackie's job is to watch the feed from closed circuit cameras sited in the less desirable areas of Glasgow (including a street called Red Road), and liaising with the police where possible to help track or prevent crime. She's a dour Scots lass who gives little away, and we build up a picture of her life very efficiently in the first few varied and colourful short scenes - her working life, her social life, her sex life and (at the edge of it) her family life.

She starts to follow an ex-con who she recognises on the cameras, eventually ingratiating herself into his life. We are kept in the dark for a very long time as to her motives and simply feel an insidious, creeping tension as she takes risks. That we become so glued to what she is up to is a great credit to the skillful characterisation and acting. It's one of those films where, if you want to feel the full impact of the surprises, the less you know about the story the better. The title maybe also suggests a path of sexual tension and danger that the protagonist feels she has to follow. The final denouement brings a surprise emotional enlightenment. If you dislike independent film-making or are averse to explicit sex, avoid Red Road; otherwise make a bee-line to see one of the most original and capable films to come out of Scotland.

Delving into the world of CCTV also opens up other questions. Britain has a very high deployment of CCTV - according to one estimate, the average Briton is recorded by CCTV cameras 300 times a day (director Andrea Arnold says in an interview that twenty per cent of all the CCTV cameras in the world are in Britain) - and there are also concerns about privacy and abuse. The film doesn't argue for or against - it seems realistic - but in portraying 'a face that watches the footage' it allows us to picture what it is maybe like on the other side of the camera when we form our ideas about the social dilemmas.

Although Red Road has been roundly praised, it is not immediately clear why it is so successful. There is very little substantive action for a long time and little of the obvious attention grabbers such as violence or heavy romance. Although it seems to be directed on a very tight leash, part of the credit no doubt should also go to Lone Scherfig (characterisation is done in part by Scherfig as collaborator), and with whose background there is a discernible connection.

Danish Director Scherfig rose to fame with Italian for Beginners, one of the successful films to be made under the strict discipline of the austere Dogme95 rules. While Red Road uses little of the formal laws of the back-to-basics Dogme system, the lessons learnt are evident: a lack of intrusive background music, no superficial action or definable genre, and so on. The reliance is on the characters themselves, and in working in the development of the Red Road characters Scherfig's genius is shining through. We feel, just as we did in her Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, that the people have just walked off the streets of Glasgow (or are still walking about on them). This style of realism is also discernible in the first British Dogme film, Gypo, released about the same time as Red Road, and together they form almost a new thread in British cinema. Whatever the reasons or antecedents, Red Road is a film of remarkable ingenuity aimed at an intelligent adult audience.

The background to the creation of Red Road is that it forms part of a project called Advance Party. Scherfig and her collaborator, in accordance with the experiment, presented the fully fledged characters to director Andrea Arnold who then wrote the plot around them. They have a life of their own instead of being altered to fit a storyline. The creative genius behind the idea, as with Dogme, is Lars von Trier. In the hands of Oscar-winning director Arnold, we again see art and new creative processes forcing their head through the much-abused medium of cinema.