BILLY LIAR @ 60

A DJ reads out requests from listeners as women burst out of their north English houses to glory in being chosen. Cut back to the DJ whose boredom with his job is clear. Meanwhile, in just such a house under the eternally overcast sky, Billy Fisher is still in bed because his daydreams are more compelling than anything in his real life. That is crammed with nagging parents, angry concurrent fiancés, a stifling job in a funeral directors, and the whole stodgy dampness of a modern world that is still being designed by old people who can't forget the war. In his mind Billy is winning wars, marching in victory parades and giving speeches to crowds grateful to hear them. But the world he's escaped just keeps coming back to drag him out of bed and push him into the street.

Billy has spent his life plummeting into trouble. When he is forced to see that he's done it to himself he sprays the messenger with machine gun bullets from his fantasy life, turning suddenly from a small town youngster into a smoky faced commando. In moments away from these hazards he falls into self grandeur; walking past a football stadium he uses the roar of the crowd as the feedback at a political rally over which he presides with Churchillian speeches while dressed as a white-tunic dictator.

But can you blame him? At home he gets nothing but more pressure to squeeze into the breathless mediocrity of his job and there is under the thumb of his control freak boss. When he can't avoid one of the women he's engaged to, the other one is around the corner to harangue him. He's running around an England about to turn into the centre of the universe and he just seems to be going in circles, tied to a nail.

Then there's Liz. He sees her almost levitating along the street and lights up. He backed away from her offer to run off to France before and he's probably thought of it daily since. There's a dance on that night and he knows he'll see her there. She's not just there but waiting for him. They flee the stodgy conga line throng and talk in the dark of the park, It sounds like another daydream but it's real this time and she is ready to guide him away from the sandpit and into what is rapidly turning into swinging London. But this is a story not a documentary and nothing happens that simply. 

It wasn't until I was an adult that I saw this film. I'd seen the '70s tv show which was hilarious and hadn't known there'd been a movie. A flatmate in the late '80s was a big fan and I made a point of taping it when it was run on tv. It fed directly into my own life as a younger fantasist who escaped every situation, fuming and formulating impossible revenge for things I'd either shouldn't have been surprised by or had set up myself. John Schlesinger realised the novel and play that preceded his film with a story made for the screen with lightning flashes to fantasy sequences that feel exactly as a Billy Fisher would have experienced them. And then he keeps the timeline (of a single day) busy, the comedy timeless and punchy and the swelling sadness underneath it increasingly visible through the cracks.

He is greatly aided by a cast of emerging and established British talent, led by the perfectly chosen Tom Courtenay whose beat group looks are extended into such a restless creativity that demands a face, gait or accent for every turn. It is such an energetic and protean performance you can't help wonder how it all seems to settle without him seeming bratty or cute. It's that sadness again. As Billy is cornered by the dour longfaced world he instantly transforms into a machinegun wielding soldier, spraying bullets over every messenger of truth or responsibility he meets. It's hilarious but there's a cost to it, as well. 

As the embodiment of the freedom he has had to invent, Julie Christie dominates every scene she's in. Liz is a writer's conceit, an antithesis for the hero to draw him to heroism but Christie's luminous lightness veils the dangerous part of adventure and its danger that is far worse than the punishment doled out by the drab locals Billy pisses off. Her urbanity, world citizenship is intimidating through that very effortlessness which with she offers the keys to the wider world. British cinema at this time was growing into its role as social soothsayer, the era is even referred to as kitchen sink cinema, by which the persistent inequalities of U.K. life were examined to the point of cultural pain. Julie Christie's Liz is not the primarily sexual escape she might have been in another film, she is the future that was happening as the credits were rolling.

Months after its debut in British cinemas, Billy Liar had a kind of essential oil cover version in Dick Lester's film of Hard Day's Night. The black and white Beatles larking around might have been scripted to appear as a slightly heightened version of ordinary blokes but, really, the movie is everything Billy Fisher could dream of. And of course, it wasn't just them as the numbers of classic rock making groups rose, invaded America, and bloomed in a culture of youthful affluence minus national service, mini-skirts and discotheques, the pill and all night clubs. It's poignant that the song that Billy wrote with his friend is sung at the dance, it's a real thing he's done that could make his real life soar. It's an occasion for a visual gag of getting spotlighted as he's trying to hide but there is a real singer on stage and people are really dancing to Twisterella. We think of this as he is eagerly whispering plans to abscond to London with Liz. Shift it a few months and it would be on the same train as the Fab Four.

But Billy Liar is about how boring responsibility is or how stultifying the dreams used to escape it really are. There is a speech about gratitude that Billy is driven to shout as he counters his parents' oppression. It's a youthful response and an honest one to the constraints of a social order that requires a flat mouthed conformity. But if he keeps rerunning those same daydreams they will sour and turn bitter and by the time of his retirement sendoff he'll be creaking off home in a blackened rage. Tom Courtenay in an interview among the extras on my Blu-Ray of the movie revealed that he got to those lines about being grateful and found they filled him with such familiar anger that could dry up completely on stage when he approach them. It is to this film's strength that they bear the same weight six decades on.

This is a favourite of mine and, like Harold and Maude or Network, will always command my attention from opening to closing. It is made of the same truths that your favourite childhood books were and its sense of youth, playing, screaming and kicking at walls, is ageless.

Review: INFINITY POOL

James and Em fall in with a bad crowd among the holidaymakers at a luxury island resort and run over a local after one of their heavy drinking picnics. This is not any island resort, it might look like the Aegean version of the Maldives but it's run by a dictatorship with a brutal police force and a psycho justice system. James was at the wheel so he's up for the charge and, after a self damning session with the local detective he's also up for capital punishment. Well, there's a loophole. People in his position can have a surrogate, a clone, killed in their place and go their ways free as a vulture. James leans back on his wife's wealth and then watches on as a family member of the deceased knifes his clone to a savage death, and smiles faintly at the spectacle. One of the bad crew, Gaby, lures him from his marital bed to party with a group of others who have all watched themselves be killed in revenge. They're not just survivors, they're thrill hounds. Watching your own execution? Bet you can't eat just one.

This tale of purchased indulgence in the arena of the one percent brings wirter/director Brandon Cronenberg back to the persistent theme in his work of identity. Again, there is a mechanism of distance at work and this allows further and deeper examination than he's done before. Adding a sense of boundless entitlement to the stew he tells a story of limit breaking in a scene that allows capital crime without real consequence. The "executed" are presented with urns of the ashes of their clones as souvenirs. This is only a few steps on from the celebrity meat or assassination by proxy of his previous two films and, at a time when eat-the rich satires are forming their own subgenre of black comedy, is presented without knowing winks. Cronenberg is punching hard and all of them are landing.

The cloning prep, which owes more than a little to Matthew Barney's weirdness, lets rave culture imagery in and a later hallucinatory sequence among the death hedonists is ripped from pornography. The handjob in an early scene might be legitimated by some mild blurring but we get a money shot. Weapons as well as rarefied drugs are procured from the resort staff. Like the infinity pool of the title, one appears in passing in a scene and another is the basis of an anecdote about an early execution experience, there is no discernible limit from the swimmer's point of view but there are always limits and those who worry about them are liable to hit their heads square on.

Add a series of bizarre masks to the cloning and the thrill kill violence, the pretensions to personal worth blurring with morality rapidly redrafted on the fly are on frequently queasy display. Unlike something like The Menu or Triangle of Sadness, Infinity Pool asks you to consider the pleasures of this amorality as they are shown to go beyond sex and drugs and rock and roll to spectacles of physical self-annihilation without a single thought of any kind of cost. We're not being asked to jeer or boo the indulgent few, we're being invited to feel their skin. 

Amid all of this, we might find ourselves surprised to empathise with James, even as he surrenders to the rush of it. He's a failed novelist who married rich and his wife admits, when asked if she loves him, that she chose someone her Murdoch-like father would hate. So when we see James begin to struggle with this bizarre culture of normlessness, we see his failure to fully integrate and the punishing grind of resisting the temptations. Alexander Skarsgard brings all the appeal of his easy physicality and tempers it with the guilt of the hanger-on and the outrage that brings him so at odds with the gang. 

His counterpart is the increasingly dazzling Mia Goth as Gaby. Using her own expensively clipped wellborn London accent rather than the various American voices her roles have served her (e.g. Pearl) she presents a compelling force, unwritten potential and intimidating control. She is at the other end of the spectrum of Andrea Riseborough's conscience-struck assassin in Possessor and her final lines of dialogue take her into the person at the base of her lethal party girl persona such that we feel the same shock as one onlooker.

Brandon Cronenberg has been criticised for falling too close from his dad's tree. He's now made three sci-fis of deep speculative fiction involving David's tropes of body horror. Why doesn't he go his own way and make a rom com? Well, because he has found his own way. This is it.

Viewing notes: The cut I saw is, on investigation, the uncensored version with explicit sex and more graphic violence. While this can be visually very strong it is pretty much always very brief.  Brandon Cronenberg himself has commented (rightly, I think) that the cuts which lessen the effect do not change the film fundamentally. The screening I went to rates the film as R18+ which suggests that it will be strictly adhered to. 

PONTYPOOL @ 15

Disgraced shock jock Grant Mazzy drives into work at his nowheresville radio station, arguing with his agent. His car is approached by a woman who is trying to say something but can't quite get her mouth around the words. She bashes her head against the passenger window and then disappears into the blizzard. Rattled, Grant drives on to his night shift gig, bickering with his producer and drizzling sarcasm over everything presented to him as news. But then the reports start going strange. There is a hostage situation. Herds of people gather to destroy cars and buildings. Even the BBC has heard tell of the strange events in the tiny Canadian town. If you've seen enough zombie films you are already guessing about this one. Then again, when we see the first symptom as it begins we wonder about that, too. A local theatre company comes in for a guest spot to sing a song from their cringey musical and one of the girls goes dead eyed and can't finish a word, repeating the sound prah over and over. The station receives government advice that includes avoiding the English language and even translating the French text. It's going to be a long and strange night.

Pontypool arrived under the radar in the late 2000s, I don't remember it from the MIFF program from that or the next year and the art houses that might have given it a screen were in the last stages of their lives in Melbourne. Like REC or Martyrs, I could only see this popping up repeatedly in overseas DVD retailers' pages. What I would do was simply wait until the prices fell and do a smash and grab click fest. Of those mentioned in this paragraph the only one I didn't screen at Shadows was Martyrs (it's a masterpiece but not for everybody). For the Pontypool screening I chose a cold Friday night when the host Milos brought out extended heating and we collected a decent turnout for a cold weather event. It went down a storm.

It generally does. I think the reason is that while it telescopes its narrative points from the word go (an arch monologue of wordplay spoken by Mazzy in a prerecord) it reveals them sparingly until the terrible truth comes out. It's no great spoiler to say that the cause of the violent zombie outbreaks is a language-borne virus which will require something a lot more sophisticated that a shot to the skull to defeat it. Do they defeat it? A post credit sequence (which annoyed me until I finally got what it referred to from earlier in the film) makes its own suggestion.

As arcane as it might seem this film does deliver as a horror movie. On the one hand the sense of apocalyptic doom mounting is worrisome and the localised violence is a grim proof of threat for the infected. And this is the point to talk about the staging. Apart from a very few outdoor shots, this whole story is told within the snowbound radio station with accounts of the atrocities and weirder developments almost entirely relayed through spoken accounts. For any other story this might feel stagey and cheap but when your threat is all about language and its dangers it feels gratifying that we hear rather than see most of the action. There is a clear sense that Grant and his coworkers are helpless to stop the carnage. Also, it means that when the horde makes it to the station, Night of the Living Dead style, everything we've learned is about to squeeze our people to the wall.

The station itself is all localised light and manipulated communication as voice feeds are variously opened and closed, advice given or ignored. What is happening with conversation is what happens in the greater world but in highly concentrated form. As each of us is unto ourselves a centre of information feeds the whole building is, here, and the players must negotiate its flow with a sense of urgency. Taking the action outdoors for big set pieces would shrink the enormity of the situation and trivialise the story.

And then you have a cast that keeps your eyes and ears on them. Lisa Houle's long suffering and patience-stretched producer shows what she has already gone through to keep this big city prima donna in his exiled state. Georgina Reilly is full of knowing pep as the assistant engineer. B ut it is the mountainously cragged Stephen McHattie who must shoulder the weight of the end of the world as fallen star Grant Mazzy.  His face is a constantly shifting display of one who has learned to say one thing with his mouth and its opposite with his eyes. With his radio perfect gravel and balm voice  and his urbane stetson-ed confidence he keeps us where he wants us for the entire time. The DVD I bought includes a radio play version which you might think would go even further than the film being constrained to the audio realm but (having not heard it) I would miss McHattie's double-thinking performance. He does the most out of all the elements of this movie to keep it cinematic.

So, fifteen years on, does it stand? Well, it was released at the dawn of social media and over a decade prior to the pandemic which applied hot and steroidal compresses to the use of language in tweet form, video bite, memes and gif animations. The world has exploded its communications and rendered the least qualified claims on everything from vaccines to climate change appear equally valid with the science, rendering the expanded opportunities of communication into a maelstrom of bullshit in which it only gets harder to find and promote the value of provable reality. What would a language virus make of a world that has already described itself  as post-truth? Would it give up and go find a market where it might at least be noticeable? Maybe the time for a genre wonder like Pontypool has been defeated by its future. But maybe, also, the solution reached through desperation by these remaining few might be worth considering. It is a confusing solution and it involves a lot of muscular self-contradiction but it did work for them. Or did it?

Pontypool is hard to find at time of writing (both dvd and blu-ray releases seem to have fallen from all catalogues) but you could try YouTube or keep your eye on the local streamers (it was available breifly through SBS on Demand). If you come across it, give it a big loving spin.

Review: BEAU IS AFRAID

After a prologue of Beau's birth seen from his perspective we get the scene in the folk tale where the elder (his analyst) gives the quester (a middle aged Beau) a magic object (pills) with instructions that must be followed on pain of peril. Then we follow Beau through his bizarrely dangerous neighbourhood to his apartment where his neighbour sends him increasingly threatening notes about the noise he's making (Beau is actually in bed trying to sleep). The neighbour retaliates with a massive techno track so loud it shakes the walls. Beau plugs his ears which makes him sleep through his alarm with only a tiny margin to get his plane to go and see his mother. Small mounting disasters keep happening until he has to call his mother who hears his plight as a contemptuous excuse. And then he takes the pills. This film is given a running time of 179 minutes, 1 minute short of the full 3 hours. There's a point to that and it has to do with this moment. That's the depth of the jokes in this sprawling absurdist epic. That's why the jokes are never that funny. And it's still three hours long.

Could it be shorter? By half and it would still tell the same story. But Ari Aster's third feature film plays a delicate balance, plunging into bleak fantasy here or restraining everything when the long and verbose explanations are running (because, boy, do they need grounding). If you've seen the poster art with Beau at different ages and you might have assumed it was a kind of Benjamin Button deal or a Terrence Malik stretch but Aster is determined that it would be neither. If you're still worried, there is a clear narrative line all the way through and not a moment of this movie is boring. However, just as the post climactic scenes start dragging you do start wondering how much longer you'll be waiting for the credits. See also both his previous feature films. He's just a film maker that can't just say goodbye. But if you do get through all that you will feel a strong satisfaction ... at the same time as wonder if you really did spend all that time just for that.

What helps is that Joaquin Phoenix's performance as Beau is masterful. Most of his dialogue is slurred through medication or the effects of violence and he has far fewer lines than most of the other central characters. This is a physical performance and, when you stretch your appreciation of it over the three hour running time you will know it as a muscular and highly refined act of clowning. This is a comedy in the classical Greek sense in that it tells the workings of the cosmos as a joke by wrenching a basic theme (mummy issues) and wringing it dry before us. Phoenix has to play this role rock solid as that clown as the story itself is fighting him. It is very hard to empathise with him (and so share his sense of hazard that all protagonists must convey) until the film is well into its second hour. By the end we feel nothing but empathy and it is almost entirely down to his stony restraint. As film performances go this is much Brando than Buster Keaton. As the universe shifts around him from hard realism to painted cardboard landscapes he compels us to keep our eyes directly on him. This, finally, what makes three hours feel relatively breezy.

I'm keeping this review quite short not just to be cute (although that is a motivation) but simply because relaying so much plot for a film that continually circles back to its theme rather than significant action seems like a diminishing return. When it was about half way through I thought of a line: this is what you get when you let Charlie Kauffman remake After Hours. But then the pieces began to suggest themselves and take on more definition. Before, when I described this as an absurdist film and said that's why the jokes aren't funny I didn't mean that absurdist humour (my favourite kind) wasn't funny. If anything the jokes and sly references here are very sensible and tend to jar because they feel too conventional. By the end I ditched the line about Kauffman doing Scorsese trying to be funny and thought instead that it's much more like Malik done right. There is no mysticism here, not even the vague and useless deity that Malik paints with watercolours. Beau is Afraid is set firmly on the tough dark earth. And that's why it works. And it's still three hours long!