GRIMMFEST digital: 'Midnight', 'Faceless'. 'We're all going to the World's Fair', 'The Free Fall'. 'The 3rd Day'

Midnight

Writer & Director - Oh-Seung Kwon

Stars – Wi Ha-Joon, Park Hoon, Ki-joo Jin

2021, South Korea

 

A hearing-impaired daughter and mother get mixed up with a devious serial killer. Well, it should be profoundly deaf, because the sound design makes it clear they can’t hear a thing. This allows sound monitors of various kinds all over the place (they must have spent all their money on them?) which aren’t quite used inventively enough. However, the portrayal of Kyung Mi (Jun Ki-joo) is mostly sympathetic although her hearing impairment is, of course, just a conceit to rack up tension and misunderstanding. It’s no mistake that the killer’s ability to talk himself out of situations is the counterpoint to her desperation to be understood; he represents the constant threat of the verbose on her impairment. Wi Ha-Joon makes for a handsome and slick killer

 

It pummels along, but it relies on everyone being a super-runner and the fumbling and stupidity of police and a little convenience-contrivance to keep things going. And going. Perhaps it’s twenty minutes too long because all the way through, the balance swings towards suspense and then rolling your eyes or shouting at characters (you may do this from the first scene) and it’s a little tiresome come the last act (No! Don’t turn your back on the killer! etc). There is a little of the debate about citizens responsibility to one another, a fine melee in a police station and a fine solution to stop him talking his way out all the time.

Faceless

Director - Marcel Sarmiento

Writers - Ed Dougherty, Marcel Sarmiento, Freddie Villacci

2021, USA

Stars - Brendan Sexton III, Alex Essoe, Terry Serpico

 

A small time trouble-maker wakes up with someone's else's face and a case of amnesia: uncovering the mystery ensues. Shadowy alleys and bars and murkier medical experiments are all there. Sexton III puts in a vulnerable performance as he experiences existential angst and identity crises, trying to piece together what happened.

 

A film of face trauma and a plot that is both conspiracy and film noir convolution. Uncomfortable throughout for the constant face abuse, packed full of too many questions (Sarmiento says this himself, but one shouldn’t fault a little over-ambition) but ultimately satisfying for the body horror and plotting in a slightly confused and confusing noir manner.

 

 

 

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

Writer & director - Jane Schoenbrun

2021, USA

Stars - Anna Cobb, Holly Anne Frink, Michael J Rogers

 

With another remarkable young performance from Anna Cobb, this is something like ‘Eighth Grade’ and ‘Wild Tigers I Have Known’ for horror girls. Friendless video teen Casey (Cobb) plays The World’s Fair, an internet horror game that is meant to possess you. The vibe is American slacker suburbia - but more shoegaze ‘Wild Tigers’ than the metal of ‘Gummo’ – with the protagonist creating her own world online, although she may be talking to no one. But then she is contacted by the dubious MJR, and afterwards she becomes increasingly unstable.

 

The pace is slow and immersive, utilising long takes and a modern teen’s ease with being on camera. Details like the colourful interior of Casey’s room are vivid and diegetic sound of rain on the roof and traffic passing becoming increasingly create unsettling ambience. It creates a convincing depiction of experience through online videos (expect your screen to buffer frequently) but, like ‘Eighth Grade’, it sides with the kids in that they know exactly how to navigate the artificial and performative world online. Empathetic and weirdly creepy as we seem to be watching a girl’s loneliness turn to mental instability, it maintains its elusiveness to the very end. A character study of teenage malaise and escapism.

 

 

The Free Fall

Director - Adam Stilwell

Writer - Kent Harper

Stars - Andrea Londo, Shawn Ashmore, Jane Badler

 

Slick but prosaic with obvious scares and gaslighting, starts all Gothic ‘Rebecca’ before a touch of ‘The Shining’ and ‘The Conjuring’ universe and ‘The Exorcist’. Possibly camp fun? It didn’t strike me the way Grimmfest’s synopsis did as “a chilling commentary on the seductiveness of Hollywood's dreams of dark romance.”

 

On the 3rd Day  -  Al Tercer Día

Director - Daniel de la Vega

Writers - Alberto Fasce, Gonzalo Ventura

2021, Argentina

Stars - Mariana Anghileri, Arturo Bonín, Diego Cremonesi

 

Like de la Vega’s previous ‘The White Coffin’, this too features a woman running around in the middle of something supernatural with a child’s life at stake. The influences and homages to Seventies films are evident (red and yellow raincoats, anyone?), but de la Vega makes the somewhat choppy pacing and nightmare logic of giallo into a pell-mell ride through tropes and mystery. There’s nothing you wouldn’t guess here, but de la Vega’s style always feels like it can’t stop to be obvious, always throwing into hints of something else that implies it could go off in any direction (the silhouette of a man wielding a crowbar in front of a house is straight out of a slasher, for example). This makes for a fun and artful ride through genre, heading for a classic last image before the credits. But there’s also more after the scrapbook credits.

 

Normally film stills in credits and post-credit codas aren’t something I like, but there is something “everything in!” about da la Vega’s style that I go even with this.

 

And the very entertaining 'Night Drive' also featured in Grimmfest today.

GRIMMFEST digital: 'Motherly', 'Shot in the Dark', 'The Spore, 'The Pizzagate Massacre'

Motherly

Director – Craig David Wallace

Screenwriters – Ian Malone, Craig David Wallace

2020, USA

 

One of those thrillers that relies on its twists, with a spot of home invasion thrown in. With her husband convicted of murdering a little girl, a mother and her bratty daughter are hidden away in a small town with only a somewhat shabby policeman for contact with the outside world. It’s slick and entertaining; clues are parcelled out in dialogue and unreliable flashbacks, but any seasoned genre fan will likely see where this is going. It’s lifted by good performances and characters that are convincingly flawed and relatable for that.

 

 

Shot in the Dark

Director – Keene McRae

Screenwriters – Kristoffer McMillan, Keene McRae, Lane Thomas

Cast – Kristoffer McMillan, Lane Thomas, Keene McRae, Austin Hébert, Christine Donlon, Jacqueline Toboni, Brandon Sklenar, Kelley Mack

 

Elliptical and fragmented, this serial killer film won’t be for everyone, especially since it features the conceit of a guy reflecting on the past whilst tied to a chair as a victim. But it’s a film just as concerned with reflection and capturing the dead-end malaise of small town lives as it is recapturing the terror and suffering of, shall we say, “torture porn”. Its performances are smouldering rather than showy, the aesthetic and temporal play are reminiscent of Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammel, but the trippiness born of close-up montages remind of Harmony Korine’s ‘Spring Breakers’ or Andrea Arnold’s ‘American Honey’. It will likely be on a second watch where the pieces and details come together, but it is the poignant social commentary about friends and inertia that distinguishes this from run-of-the-mill killer films.

 

 

The Spore

Writer & Director – DM Cunningham

2021, USA

Cast – Haley Heslip, Peter Tell, Jackson Ezinga, Jeannie Jefferies

An infection horror with an ambient, mood-piece feel initially, helped immensely by Dreaming In Neon’s score. Leaving radio broadcasts to deal with the big picture stuff, ‘The Spore’ focuses on a few characters, providing vignettes of their encounters with a lethal spore that kills and mutates. An audience will likely spend several moments shouting at the characters onscreen not to act stupid (“No, DON’T go and check it out!”; and who goes backpacking when the news is full of coverage…? But then I remember the behaviour of some during this actual pandemic, so…), and perhaps the acting is a little hit-or-miss, but the ambience is good and the mutations increasingly fun. It’s beautifully shot with good use of the green of the forest and garage neons. The radio broadcasts are well done, and the infected are nicely sickening (body-horror fans will be satisfied) before it gleefully goes all goofy practical mutations, quite winningly.

 

The Pizzagate Massacre

Director – John Valley

Screenwriter – John Valley

2021, USA

Cast - Tinus Seaux, Alexandria Payne, Lee Eddy, Mike Dellens, John Valley

 

John Valley’s film (and it is his film as he directed, wrote, co-scored, produced and undoubtably made the coffee and acts in the key role of the bad guy) lays its cards on the table at the start as a commentary on modern toxic media and macho militias. When a reporter, Karen Black (Alexandria Payne), is fired from a despicable conspiracy-spewing right-wing television show, she sees her opportunity in making a mark by following up a conspiracy regarding a small pizza outlet (pizzagate was one of the most catchy and inflammatory Trump-era conspiracies). For this, she befriends Duncan Tinus Seaux, a deluded militia man (and David Koresh offspring) trying to pull himself towards something better but unable to quite let go of the conspiracies.

 

Even though the whacko behaviour of the militia is played for comedy at the early stages, Valley’s film isn’t just lampoons and caricatures. These militiamen act as if they are in their own action movie, and Valley says in the Q&A that this is what he’s observed himself; but Valley is more interested in humanising the deluded Duncan, and in this he is helped by an increasingly nuanced and excellent performance by Tinus Seaux. Alexandria Payne is adamantly unreadable throughout, her motives murky but evidently mercenary. Valley as Philip is potentially the most comic-bookish, but provided with such a reflective context, he comes across as the loose cannon he is, both laughable and dangerous. Lee Eddy is manic and hysterical as the conspiracy spewing Terri Lee, but that seems totally in keeping (note how the producer keeps reminding her of her contract when she’s threatened with death). It’s in these details that a complex web of motivation and complicity it conveyed. Who’s making the money?

 

It's funny and thoughtful and ultimately a plea from the inside to stop pouring toxic and crazy shit to the susceptible.

Looking at the two posters for this film, called ‘Duncan’ in the US, one plays up the conspiracy theory mind, but the other plays to the action grindhouse road movie angle. Both have merit, although the former implies a far trippier film.

GRIMMFEST digital 2021: 'Slapface', 'The Night Belongs to Monsters', 'For Roger', 'Father of Flies', 'Happy Times'

GRIMFEST digital 2021

 

SLAPFACE

Writer & Director: Jeremiah Kipp

2021, USA

Cast – August Maturo, Mike Manning, Libe Barer, Mirabelle Lee, Dan Hedaya

 

Kipp frontloads his film about abandoned, simmering youth with the game of “slapface”, where the two orphaned brothers slap each other’s faces to vent pent up anger. Domestic abuse and bullying are the themes – underlined by end text – where the older brother Tom (Manning) is ill equipped to deal with bringing up his slightly wayward younger brother, Lucus (Maturo). Lucus is friendless and bullied by three girls, one of whom he carries out a clandestine friendship of sorts and flirtation, but things take a turn when he befriends a witch he discovers in an abandoned Gothic building. The witch is deliberately the kind found in old fairy tales, but is here a manifestation of his latent disturbance and violence, and by being mostly kept as a looming shadow, is properly eerie.

 

In fact, the whole tone is a mixture of the consistently eerie and the dejected realism of, say, ‘River’s Edge’, or the second half of ‘Ham on Rye’. It’s not quite the supernatural unleashing the child’s psychopathic side, as with an example like ‘The Pit’, for Lucus is just a troubled, misunderstood kid and the witch – which he seems to have summoned as an unforgiving feminine force – becomes a loose cannon protective monster for him. Maturo puts in an excellent performance, by turns dejected, feisty, frustrated and sad.

 

And in scenarios like this, we’re often left taking the blame for the monsters we have unleashed or have affinity for. As with all the best horror-bildungsroman, it conjures a troubling emotional charge.

 

The Night Belong to Monsters

Director – Sebastian Perillo

Screenwriter – Paula Marotta

2021, Argentina

Cast – Lu Grasso, Esteban Lamothe, Jazmín Stuart, Gustavo Garzón, Agustin Daulte, Macarena Suárez

 

Again, set in a downbeat world of a troubled teen. Sol is uprooted from her beloved Grandma’s to live with her mother’s new lover, who mum can’t stop pawing. Bullied and friendless, vulnerable in a new bedroom where the door doesn’t close, Sol saves a trapped white dog with seemingly preternatural abilities, telepathically bonding with it so that it becomes her violent defender.

 

Again, centred in a strong young performance from Lu Grasso, Perillo’s film is low key and mostly nocturnal, its vibe moody and downcast. It suggests a bond between violence and sex, primal reactions to adolescent angst, etc, but it never quite has the poignancy promised by its title. Ultimately, it leaves Sol codling her violent manifestations, a happy ending. Miserablist coming-of-age with a supernatural uplift.

 

 

For Roger

Director - Aaron Bartuska

Screenwriter – Aaron Bartuska, Gwyn Cutler, Derek Pinchot

2021, USA

 

Cabin in the woods; a masked assailant: yes, it’s low-budget homemade horror time. It takes close to an hour before things kick in, otherwise it’s Roger watching home videos of being a passive-aggressive dick to his late girlfriend. A slow burn isn’t an issue, but there is the sense that nine out of ten shots last too long. In the end, despite sparks of insight into gaslighting and the “My Life On Film!” generation, the home invasion horror gives way to Roger’s self-pity.

 

 

Father of Flies

Director – Ben Charles Edwards

Screenwriters - Ben Charles Edwards, Nadia Doherty

Cast - Nicholas Tucci, Camilla Rutherford, Davi Santos, Sandra Andreis, Page Ruth

 

Comes across as a wicked witch/stepmother tale. It’s perpetual oddness and conflict between naturalism and affection, even a hint of giallo, and the ever popping-up threat of a cheaper horror of ‘The Conjuring’ variety make for an odd concoction. Again, another film grounded in a notable young performance from Keaton Ketlow as the boy through whose perspective this is mostly filtered. Camilla Rutherford plays up the English Oddball Stepmother That Must Not Be Trusted for all its worth (the massage mask signals her otherworldliness and untrustworthiness to the max).

 

For a while, this oddness and fairy-tale affectation reminded me of Philip Ridley’s work. Ultimately, it ends up both more satisfying and cruel than maybe predicted.

 

Happy Times

Director – Michael Mayer

Screenwriters – Michael Mayer, Guy Ayal

Cast – Michael Aloni, Iris Bahr, Shani Atias, Liraz Chamami, Alon Pdut, Ido Mor, Mike Burstyn, Daniel Lavid

 

A dinner party that starts out privileged and ordinary enough descends into violent farce via grudges both petty and large, as well as bigotries both quiet and vocal. It’s a class thing with almost everyone a money-making professional – one character laments why they can’t have a party with just “normal” people – so the thin line between the monied and savagery is a given, but it’s also a very pointed criticism of Israeli machismo, stubbornness, misogyny and prejudices. It's this that is most provocative, but it’s a satire that knows what it’s doing: no one is spared when the violence and grudges start and there’s only one way it can end. And watch how a character knows how to spin prejudice and accusations of prejudice to get rid of the police.

 

Not so broad it becomes wanton slapstick, it keeps its eye on the allegory, is well performed, escalating organically from insolences and pettiness already in place. And it’s funny.

 

**

 

In the Q&A for ‘Slapface’, director Jeremiah Kipp spoke of how horror is an ideal genre for dealing with domestic horror just by throwing in a monster of some sort, and all these films adhere and prove that. ‘Happy Times’ has no supernatural element, but the violence and gore belong to the horror genre (the horror being their prejudice, privilege, etc). The use of the genre in all these films lay bare  the dysfunctions and disturbances in a way otherwise not possible, resulting in emotional content and affect not reachable otherwise.

'The Go-Between', LP Hartley's novel and film adaptations

The Go-Between

LP Hartley, 1953

 

LP Hartley’s ‘The Go-Between’ is one of my favourites about English repression, along with Terence Rattigan’s ‘The Browning Version’ and Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Remains of the Day’. It’s also one of my favourite bildungsroman, being a magnificent capturing of the turmoil of feelings and thoughts of a young man in the early stages of adult understanding, and the trauma of those feeling and thoughts on the rest of an adult life. If you are at all still prone to dwelling and flinching at childhood and teenage embarrassment throughout your adult life, the novel’s bookends are bound to be affecting.

 

In his introduction, Hartley writes, “More than any other part of the book, the Epilogue has been found fault with. The Prologue and Epilogue together, critics said, made a frame too heavy for the picture. I should have done better to stop with the discovery of the lovers in the outhouse and leave the rest to the reader’s imagination.”* Which in my opinion is quite wrong and misunderstanding, and would make this a far lesser text. It would be forsaking somewhat the insight into trauma and lifelong repression for far more prosaic suspense and scandal. As it is, there is a resounding sense of pending doom, of a past event never come to terms with, a moment of permanent scarring. Surely exclusion of these bookends would compromise the characters’ lifetime of misunderstanding, the realisation of their self-delusion, the ties of memory, which are integral to the tragedy. The opening reflection where the older Leo is having an argument with his younger self, blaming each other for letting the other own, is a passage I have always found profoundly affecting.

It's the tale of a sensitive Eton boy – with a schoolboy’s tendency towards the sensational – staying at a friend’s English estate during the summer of 1900, and unwittingly and increasingly entangled in clandestine adult passions. Hartley apparently wrote the novel meaning Marrian and Ted to be objected to, only to find that readers sided with the forbidden love. It’s a book surely to find more favour with rule-breakers and romantics. I mean, it opens with a quote from Jane Austen. But, per his introduction, Hartley seems happily to have the strength of his book as maybe something he hadn’t quite planned. Colm Tóibín’s introduction to the NYRB edition speaks of how he “had softened the character of Marian and Ted as he worked on the book and had been too interested in the aura of uncontrolled sensuality between them to bother disapproving of them.”** There is a passage where, having been at Brandham Hall a while, Leo’s happiness overrides the strictures of religion; his flourished sense of ease and joy makes him positively despise judgementalism. Away from the oppression of school and left to his own devices, Leo becomes happy and altruistic. Yet instead of leaving this feeling a triumph, it can be read that Hartley means the subsequent tragedy to be a punishment for this transgression, this blasphemy. Leo is a conservative child and his friend Marcus more so – they’re Etonians – but happiness suits him, kindness enlivens him, but he is left wide open and vulnerable to injury. Hartley is good at the bubble happiness puts a person in. Yet, ultimately it would seem that Hartley’s joy in seeing Leo happy – that is: the Leo from this passage that berates religion for judging people always as sinners – and Hartley’s/Leo’s fascination and bafflement with taboo sensuality makes this a far more empathic story than moral. This is the side that wins out.

 

The centrepiece is the cricket match, which takes up several chapters, bringing to the fore the class conflict which is otherwise always in the background. The themes are obvious, just as the use of signifiers and symbols are evident throughout the novel. For example, Leo eventually takes afront at the green of his suited gifted by Marion, its colour signifying his naivete when he wants so much to be considered adult (this is the early Twentieth Century where the concept if children as mini-adults is standard); the threat of deadly nightshade; blood on an envelope, etc.  But the theme of class war, otherwise just a given backdrop, is bundled up in this sporting confronting between the town and Brandam Hall. The sides seem relatively equal – one side by skill and the other by brute force – but it’s Leo, the outsider and inbetweener – that wins the day. And his catching Ted out is portentous in itself. The rules of the game keep the war in check, but the battle is there.

 

The school rules about a boy’s conduct are an ill guide for Leo’s negotiation of this adult world. Hartley is very good on Leo’s various motivations, at the complex influences on his decisions; for example, on why he reads Marian’s note and the decision arrived at from a schoolboy’s moral code. Leo also turns to greater forces, creates his own religion of “curses” to try react to and control what he can’t. Beneath all the conservatism and rubrics that he’s happy to accord to, Leo is a passionate creature really, sensitive and observant, naïve and imaginative; and the conflict of these opposing sides will eventually lead to a breakdown and lifelong “drying up”. 

There’s also a lot of pathetic fallacy, what with all the greatest summer matching Leo’s happiness and passion – which Leo wishes to get hotter and hotter – and the coming on of storms when things start to go wrong. It also alludes to Leo’s experiences being symbolic of the passing of a century’s innocence, something of the fin de siècle, as he often says his thinking of the promise of the next century and how it let him down. This is, after all, an aging man reflecting in the shadow of World Wars. Perhaps this is the novel’s most tenuous allusion, but there is no doubt that it is moving when he recounts on the subsequent losses during wartime in the epilogue. Yet such evident symbolism throughout the book never capsizes the subtlety and mystery. And note the heady rising of the heat at a moment with Ted… and a feeling like a “feather on a tiger”. It’s total accord with the symbolism and signifiers already established in the narrative and hints at the novel’s greater repression and mystery.

‘The Go-Between’ is not the paradigm of ambiguity like ‘The Turn of the Screw’, nor the Gothic mystery of ‘The Haunting of Hill House’, or such blatant class cruelty such as ‘The House of Mirth’, or the ripe nostalgia of ‘Cider with Rosie’; but it has a little of all of these and walks an eloquent and emotional path across English green fields all of its own.

And here is an excellent de-coding by grumblingappendix of the novel's deep signifiers, signposting what I have been coy about.

 

 

The Go-Between

Director - Joseph Losey

Screenplay - Harold Pinter

Stars - Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Dominic Guard

UK, 1971

 

The tone of the novel’s ominous prologue is well captured by the piano opening of Michel Legrand’s theme for Joseph Losey’s film adaption of ‘The Go-Between’. It is choppy and more resonant of doom-laden horror before delivering its flourishes of melodrama. This is an apt and astute choice, evoking the impending tragedy and emotional devastation of the novel’s prologue, creating the atmosphere of pending doom.

 

The scenes at first are rapid, with some narrative and some temporal play creating clues and a little abstraction. It instantly conveys that this is a story that resounds from one end of a life to the other; it reminds of Nicolas Roeg dicing around with time. Harold Pinter’s screenplay and Joseph Losey’s direction immediately know that this is the strength of the piece, as well as that primal scene, no matter if critics told Hartley that the bookends were too weighty. But then, as Leo settles into long, languid, sweltering summer days at the Hall, the pace discreetly slows as the tale unfolds. In fact, the first time the films pauses and lingers is on Julie Christie’s pretty sunbathing face. Any stiltedness is totally in accord with English Edwardian stately manners and Pinter’s often clipped dialogue conveys the distance between a person’s passion and performance as a personality. He cherry picks some of the best lines and details from the novel– there’s a dog rather than a horse called Dry Toast; there’s a bloodstained envelope – and, of course, starts with its famous and celebrated opening line about the past being a foreign country. Pinter’s sparse, splintering style is superficially at odds with Hartley’s flourishes, but Pinter gets to the nub of it, and Losey’s formal play captures the abstractions. Despite the obvious symbolism, both writers know to hold all revelations at arm’s length.

 

Dominic Guard sets a great rendition as Leo, all naivete and manners; his halting yet precise affectation when speaking capturing how out of depth he is and trying to rely on a certain kind of upper-class conduct. He exudes stiff upper-lipness in the face of anxiety. This hits its mark truly when Leo is in an emotional state, having been hurt by Marian, and badgers Ted into explaining “spooning” (silly word). Sweaty, upset, insistent and clutching in a way he never is elsewhere, it’s a heart-breaking moment of a child desperate to understand an adult world he isn’t prepared for. It’s a moment that Hartley himself seemingly saw as exceeding his own original: “- I wept at the scene where Leo questions Ted about ‘spooning’ – which is more than I did when I wrote my version of it.” Guard, in recollection, says he doesn’t remember being directed much, although he says Losey could be ruthless with others (Guard went on to be a psychotherapist). It’s all performance in the face of unease, of putting on a brave face but being out of depth. Even down to the detail that, by his own admission, Guard looks like he’s in pain when singing to a crowd.

 

My memory of the film is always of Leo running through vast green fields. They even painted some of the grass which surely only adds to a certain dream-like tinge to Leo’s memories. Julie Christie is effortlessly beautiful and disarming, radiating an unaffected charm that puts her as somewhat an outsider just as much as Leo. Edward Fox is effortlessly regal; Michael Gough full of that old man distractedness; Margaret Leighton perfectly glacial. Alan Bates is suitably raw and insecure in a particularly masculine way, his unaffected charm and temper showing how performative the Brandham Hall lot are by comparison. The moments between him and Leo are true highlights, always shuffling round each other and never quite coming to the point, but there’s a true warmth there. He’s someone else out of his depth.

 

It a brilliantly pitched rendition of the novel, where Losey’s playfulness and Pinter’s screenplay keep it from being just a highly respectable adaptation, but something that truly captures the oddness of the novel also.

 

The Go-Between 

Director

Pete Travis

Writer - Adrian Hodges

Stars - Jim Broadbent, Jack Hollington, Samuel Joslin

 

Which is quite what the BBC adaptation is. It’s a more straightforward version. Of course, comparison with Losey’s version is inevitable, and much is anticipated to be lacking. It tries to capture the conflict of Leo’s old and young selves arguing with one another, but it’s literal and it feels a little unconvincing, a little mundanely executed in that BBC heritage fashion. Jim Broadbent staring maudlinly from the train which rheumy eyes sets the tone. None of the crisp English repression here.

 

It is, of course, prettily filmed with the contemporary style of a constantly shuddering camera. The past is gorgeous green and gauzy, again hinting at sentiment rather than clarity. Jack Hollington as Leo is notably younger here, a far more passive entity with some of his verboseness even going to others. For example, he barely asserts himself with Ted Burgess when caught and injured on the haystack. Ted even mentions that he’s a little small for his age, but what we don’t truly get is Leo’s overcompensation by stressing the mannerisms of his Eton status. He is more bashful than anxious. Leo’s a little robbed of agency, but it does accentuate his vulnerability.

 

We get Trimmingham’s (Stephen Campbell Moore) injured face as far more than just an ornamental scar here, which is an improvement. The patriarch is removed, making way for more Trimmingham but missing the point of the there-but-absent patriarch. And the younger ages of Marian and Ted are more appropriate. Ben Batt is far more an obvious hunk here as Ted, rather than say Bates’ bit-of-rough, more erotised with nudity and adorned with a beard that is a little designer trimmed. He doesn’t have Bates’ presence of being and oversized boy. Some of the rough, raw edges of Losey’s version have been sandpapered off. Even little details nod at this: for example, Leo now says “Bad luck!” instead of “Hard cheese!”  There is a sense that everything is made that bit more obvious, less mysterious, knowing looks more readable. It gets increasingly worse when a voiceover is employed by Leo to explain his spells. But then it sidesteps Leo’s confrontation with the deadly nightshade. Even the pathetic fallacy is amped up to have Leo lying in a torrent of rain. It becomes obvious that this version is all Forbidden Love and sentiment instead of the mysteries of passion and misunderstanding. 

 

There’s a sense of a respectable cover version that fails to get at the essence. It replaces the insight and the mystery of Hartley’s tale by reducing it to just romantic tragedy and voiceovers. It's similar to how many adaptations of Bronte's 'Wuthering Heights' focus on Cathy and Heathcliff and forego the wider picture.

**

Ali Smith writes of Hartley's novel, “It is a masterpiece of double-speak and secrecy, somehow both ambiguous and direct,” and that’s the oddness and mystery I have referred to. Joseph Losey had already delivered crystalline, slightly untouchable and abstract films on Englishness with ‘The Servant’ and ‘Accident’, and this tone fits perfectly for telling Leo’s sad tale of a life ruined by knowing and not knowing, of innocence and manipulation. Perhaps in some way, the final revelation of “spooning” hinted in Leo’s mind of a love that dare not speak its name, and so he shut down and dried up rather than accept it. But that’s just one enigma to ‘The Go-Between’, a fascinating, lush, eloquent and sympathetic novel of growing up in the oddness and harshness of the English class system. And not to forget that the teenage Leo’s diary ends up written in a code long forgotten and impenetrable to his older self. Childhood is a foreign country too.