Voice Over

I saw this film in 1983 just after it had been made. I saw it at Cardiff Art School which is the same college Chris Monger studied at. It's an atmospheric film shot in 16mm and my memory of it is that it was Chris Monger's first film after leaving college and as such it's a great movie. Unfortunately my memory of the plot is not too good, but I can say that the character of 'Fats' Bannerman played by Ian McNeice has stuck in my memory strongly. Bannerman is a radio host/VO artist and is played really competently. The viewer is drawn into that world of late night broadcasting. He has gone on since Voice Over to play a whole heap of other roles in successful films including Chris Monger's most famous film 'The Englishman Who Went up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain'

Difficult and rather unusual but I rather liked this taken from the original 16mm elements. The radio 'play' is the narrative given every night and made up before during the day or maybe as he makes it up as he goes on. It is something like a 19th century romance and he has some postcards of some famous painting as his inspiration. This has lots of people who apparently love it and listen on the radio although maybe they find it silly. So he gets upset and starts changing the story having a vampire or more violence. Then there is really violence first with two girls when he gets drunk and even more when he brings home a bloodied women from the street back to his place. This is really rather worrying, we think she might be dead or dying and then he undresses and redresses her which I find even more troubling. It goes on a little too long towards the end but it is rather impressive for this with such a low budget when he had been at Chelsea School of Art in London. I understand that at the time he was, like many of us, inspired by Warhol and loved Heat (1971) that was a little based on Sunset Boulevard (1950). At the end and the very, long slow out zoom reminded me of the experimental short, Wavelength (1967) Michael Snow. With this surprisingly Christopher Monger also went on to make, The Englishmen Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain (1992) with Hugh Grant.

"Voice Over" is one of the great lost independent films of the 8o's. And believe me, there weren't many great films in that dull, flat-line decade. The film delves into the mind of a radio DJ in Wales who has gained a cult following through his dramatic readings. His life is slowly unraveling when he discovers a severely beaten woman on the side of a road. He takes her into his flat and cleans and dresses her. A kind of primitive consciousness takes hold of the man and pulls him shaking and stuttering into a deep, murky excursion down the rabbit hole to a place somewhere between Cocteau and Polanski. On a larger scale, the film's main themes are a meditation on the shattering, fragmented remnants of communication in modern society, the inability to find love, and a desperation and loneliness that culminate in a final flailing struggle to justify one's existence in a stark, desolate landscape. The only other closest parallel I can think of to this film is the music of Ian Curtis and Joy Division. "Voice Over" is a sort-of visual equivalent to whatever gray mist Curtis was motoring through, whilst not too far away (roughly at the exact same time) director Christopher Monger was creating his own dark song. The tragedy here is that while Curtis' work eventually found a wider audience, Monger's work remains hidden away, probably buried under some old clothes in the filmmaker's closet.

"Voice Over" was originally shot in 16mm and at the time that accounted for one of the main reasons it was seen by relatively few people. As far as I know, in the States, it only played at the Bleeker Street Cinema in NYC in the 1983 which is where I saw it. Janet Maslin wrote an almost criminally moronic review in the New York Times, which gave away the film's entire plot. While totally concentrating on it's more sensational aspects, Maslin somehow managed to miss the central point of the film as well as glossing over its deeply profound originality. Film critics have no idea the damage they cause by trashing work beyond their limited view. Critics are not artists and many times they simply lack the ability to comment on or appreciate unusual works. I don't remember entirely how it was received in Europe, but I seem to remember a depressed Monger at the time, stating that some sort of controversy dogged it wherever it was presented. This was actually a sign of the films greatness! Sometimes people's first reaction to works of startling invention is to slam the work and wipe it out without seeking to explore the unconscious part of them the work has tapped into. In this case, a great work of art was literally buried. It will perhaps one day be discovered for the treasure it is. I suspect it hasn't dated in all these years and may now be more relevant than ever.

With the advent of DVD there is no excuse for this film to remain unseen. I know hardly anyone will probably read this review, but if by accident any independent DVD distributors stumble on these words looking for a lost gem, seek and ye shall find many rewards within.

There's a real low-fi artistry to Christopher Monger's Voice Over, the beautifully grainy unrestored 16mm and handheld photography giving it a positively dirty atmosphere; an atmosphere that offers a bold, ambitious feature that challenges notions of gender and defies certain comfortable narrative tropes. The stark reality of human interaction in the more abrasive 20th-century charts the course of the complete self-destruction of its main character, Fats, whose precarious sense of self is entirely dependent on the perpetuation of a fantasy. In trying to lose the kitsch appeal of his work, Fats ultimately commits creative vandalism to pander to his newly discovered youth crowd, with this vandalism comes growth. The film then takes a darker turn with what seems like a significantly missing scene from the narrative, but this superbly ambiguous turn works to the film's advantage, magnificently setting Fats up as a potential monster and, simultaneously, a good Samaritan, you choose; in deliberately leaving out this event, it lets us judge Fats' subsequent actions from very liquid foundations, with further power stemming from Ian McNeice's powerhouse performance. We are morbidly invited to climb into his mind in the same way we'd enter a condemned building, you know it's going to collapse but you don't know when. An intelligent and darkly pondering study on loneliness and detachment, Voice Over will challenge you as you bare witness to a mind crumbling dangerously in front of you, a quasi-artistic schizoid fracture, unspooling like a reel of film. Truly gripping stuff.