sneersnipe film review

Simon Rumley kicked me in the face. How so? Imagine yourself at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, a film festival renowned for films that ‘push the edge’ of mainstream with a strong focus on the work of new directors. Somewhere in between the succession of low budget anthropological and character studies along the lines of ‘the emotional effect of Lara Croft upon the lives of Peruvian Llama herders’, came a visual jab in the eye, a jarring blast of something outstandingly different. Something called The Living and the Dead directed by Simon Rumley.

Rumley, a British director previously known for a trio of character based, youth culture centric films (Strong Language (1996), The Truth Game (2001) and Club Le Monde (2002)) had gone AWOL. Or as Rumley put it describing his impressive back catalogue: “You can get them all from Love Film or Blockbusters. They’re quite different from this.” He went on “I wanted to try something different.” The Living and the Dead returns to a previous style Rumley had used in his short films. “Where as a director I did more visually” No kidding.

The Living and the Dead follows the decrepit Brocklebank family, impoverished English aristocrats marooned within their own empty stately home. Father Donald (played by the ever-versatile Roger Lloyd Pack) cares for his seriously ill wife Nancy and his mentally deficient grown up son James. When Donald has to go away for a few days James tries to take charge but forgets to take his medicine. Cue mind bending Darren Aronofsky style state of mind sequences, general unpleasantness and tragedy. And Roger Lloyd Pack with a melted candle on his head: “I was in Venice, at the Biennale, and I saw a photograph at one of these shows of a religious festival in Spain and it had a guy with candles on his head and really heavy makeup. And the candle wax had all melted down on his face and formed this kind of pattern.”

Set in an almost abandoned country house the film takes the almost quintessentially English setting and sets about warping it into something else altogether right from the start. "The place where we shot it belongs to Lord Cardigan in real life, and it was a prep school for a while and then it got turned into a drug rehabilitation centre. So from the offset it came with that kind of institutional background which we quite liked…When we got there it was completely empty. Everything you see there we brought in. So it looked like two hundred rooms with nothing in them. Maybe a bit of graffiti and that’s it”.

Where ‘x’ number of films are shot in the obligatory country house, few care to actually mess with the setting itself. It’s just there as whatever sordid little melodrama plays itself out. Opening with a chimera of a shot that combines radically different impressions of England simply by putting a suit of armour and some mangy institutional radiators in the same frame, The Living and the Dead through looks alone screams ‘Fuck heritage cinema’ giving theme-park Britannia a firm shove off. It might be set in a stately home but this isn’t yet another Merchant Ivory cash-in. There’s too much piss on the carpet for that.

Taking notes from Aronofsky and Tsukamoto Shinya (director of Tetsuo) Rumley gets inside the head of his seriously disturbed protagonist creating viciously bipolar sequences where the film goes into overdrive as James charges along the empty corridors of his home. “In terms of setting it all in one house it was very important to find a really large location…When he [Leo Bill, the actor who plays James] went from the bedroom to the kitchen we were shooting at 5 frames a second which means it was 5 or 6 frames quicker than normal: which means he goes 20 metres in a flash! So finding somewhere that really was that big was daunting…Most of the larger stately homes in the UK have been taken over by the National Trust, or four or five rich city traders or pop stars.”

Nightmare sequences follow including the feverishly messed up visage of veteran UK television actor Roger Lloyd Pack with said melted candle on his head. “I was always aware that the environment in which we were setting it was a very traditional British milieu. You can imagine Merchant Ivory or BBC Drama using this. We’ve really subverted it into something quite different by having the two [styles] merged together, coming up with what I hope is a unique piece of cinema, certainly by British standards”.

Seemingly set in a sedate pastoral pile devised by a pilled up Capability Brown, Rumley’s film clearly forgets to takes its medicine before bedtime. However what exactly is wrong with James is wisely omitted. “Leo and I discussed it a few times. A few people said after reading the script that they needed to know what’s wrong with him: I felt that we didn’t. I thought by putting the specifics of what’s actually wrong with him and how long he’s been like that was taking away from the surreal aspects of the film, taking it more into a Ken Loach or My Left Foot situation. Where suddenly it’s not about the whole visual experience, what’s going on, it’s more about this boy with Down’s syndrome or this boy who was schizophrenic or this boy who is an epileptic. I didn’t want to make a film specifically about any kind of mental illness. The actor had a very strong idea of what we wanted and so did I. It’s open to interpretation.” Smart move. By avoiding giving his protagonist any hoop onto which a focus group could fling its ire, Rumley should avoid the problems other recent films (Inside I’m Dancing for example) have encountered by portraying certain groups. The question does linger for a while but the story is really about the ‘what happens’ as opposed to the ‘how it happened’.

Returning to why Rumley changed subject area and focus in his work is a sad story in itself. “I did a trilogy. That’s what I set out to do. I actually wrote a script with my mate Charles, an ensemble film about the highs and lows of cocaine consumption in London, which had a similar feel to it but it was pan-generational and again there would have been much more direction in it. But then my mum died of cancer. We found out in November, she died in March.” And from this personal tragedy something else grew. “I spent most of that time with her which was where the idea for this initially came. And it was just something I started writing as a process of exorcism.” Clearly this personal jolt helped propel Rumley into a whole new arena of work.

Very much in the same wave of recent British films like The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, Song of Songs, The Road to Guantanamo or the forthcoming Brothers of the Head; The Living and the Dead is a reassuring blip on our home-grown cultural radar demonstrating that all is not well at home in blighty, and people like Simon Rumley have stepped forward to remind us of this. The result here is a gruelling slice of contemporary cinema somewhere akin to Misery or Whatever Happened to Baby Jane at double the revs. Or as Rumley himself puts it “You can take little bits here and there. In the end we came down to The Shining meets My Left Foot. That was the Hollywood pitch type thing.”

A review of The Living and the Dead can be found here.