Reviews

It was good to be able finally to watch this adaptation of a haunting short story, full of resonance. The adaptation was better than expected, as I was led to believe by the producer when I contacted him about the series some years ago that none of the "Night Voices" episodes was very good. Possibly he did not appreciate Aickman's teasing tone, which captivates and bewilders in equal measure? Bewilderment is probably its prime intention, in order to wake the unsuspecting audience - of whom Maybury can stand as representative - from his (or her - but females in Aickman's work tend to wake through different means) everyday stupor, the life of monotony and habit which dominates "Coulsdon Man" (as Aickman termed him in pages which were left unpublished from the second volume of his autobiography, THE RIVER RUNS UPHILL). And so Maybury, a middle-aged married man with one son and a Ford car, is bewildered when he encounters the hospice. What is it exactly that he encounters there? Death, perhaps? If so, not his. Not anyone's in particular (the "incident" that occurs during the night remains typically unexplained - part of the story's elliptical manner, possibly derived from dreams, with their characteristics of "condensation and displacement" - though apparently the story was inspired by the author's chancing across a hostelry in the Tunbridge Wells area while in the company of his two female friends, affectionately termed "the Mothers", who are the dedicatees of the story collection in which "The Hospice" first appeared). Death is certainly in the air - in the stuffy, overheated, hothouse atmosphere, where apparent decorum barely conceals dysfunction, desperation and panic. The denizens of the hospice are certainly not well. They are terrified of being alone (are they even chained together at dinner?), and terrified of what is outside. Which is the intimation of something unspeakable - to be avoided and denied at all costs (witness the bolting of the front doors after dinner!). Meal portions are outsize but they do not nourish. Energy - human and fossil - is being sapped by undefined terrors. There is a yearning for a more secure past (the nostalgic gaslight, the fine dress Cecile wears, the shared bedroom which seems to hark back to the heyday of the single-sex public school, the upright Falkner, who tries to hold everything together) - ultimately there is a yearning for the mother's womb, but the feral darkness outside cannot be ignored, despite the curtains without windows (Maybury brings in with him the bloody leg from the wild animal bite, we can hear the cries of the wild animals in the darkness, Cecile speaks hysterically of "all those people in the world without proper food....without love...without even proper clothes..."). Daylight brings apparent release - and Maybury suffers an apparent reprieve. All in all an admirable and faithful rendering of the author's distinctive vision of the world, with fine central performances and art direction, though I would have preferred to see the ending as written in the original story, in which Maybury is left suspended between two worlds ("One of the undertaker's men said that he should not have to wait long.").

JELLY DOLLY could maybe be categorized as a horror film, but like many good works that fail to get the attention they deserve, it is really "sui generis". Yes, there are faults: some of the acting could be stronger, some scenes seem random and unnecessary, the basic conceit seems a bit derivative (of Cronenberg's VIDEODROME, with which it shares very little in other respects) yet this film is still an extraordinarily imaginative work, also a film which seems to be about what it is to experience the world as a woman in modern Britain, where an immense inner potential is untapped and goes unrecognized by most. It risks being incomprehensible to men (and maybe some women too) but for those who are familiar with works like THE WISE WOUND (a possible influence?) it is something to be valued highly. Hopefully the director will be able to make more films: she is highly visual and cinematic in her approach. All in all, this film, which I saw more or less by chance, is really quite something.

This film really needs to be seen to be appreciated properly. It's difficult to do justice to it in a review. It is superbly visual, risk-taking, imaginative; not everything works (a lot of the cast seem chosen for their singing rather than their acting ability) and yet it is compulsively watchable (I am referring to the director's cut of just over 2 hours). At its best it contains a hypnotic, mesmeric quality which few films attain (few British ones, at any rate). In fact, the whole last half-hour or so is astoundingly delirious, on a par with the last half-hour of Powell and Pressburger's BLACK NARCISSUS or THE RED SHOES (Donizetti's music helps, of course, and it is extremely well sung by Amanda Boyd, in her only film role). This would certainly be a welcome DVD release.

This film was shown at the London Film Festival earlier this week as the first in a programme of shorts; such was its effect on me it threw me off balance and I did not pay much attention to the other items on the programme (apart from a delightful and poignant documentary about a man and a sheep). From the very first shots, which reveal themselves in retrospect to be not an indulgent stylistic quirk but an ironic foreshadowing of what is to come, this work holds the attention and does not let it go. A sense of unease, of strange dislocation, is set up from the outset and only increases as the film unfolds. The contrasts in casting between female and male roles, the nervous spare jokey dialogue, the bleak and incongruous setting (who belongs there?), the atmospheric, ominous lighting all contribute to make this one of the most uncommonly powerful short films I have seen. I am looking forward to seeing it again with the added awareness of what is to come.