England for the Americans

From Britain With Love, a notable program of six new films from Great Britain now playing at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (through July 9), shames our current American output. This exciting exhibition is sponsored by the UK Film Council and the U.S. company, Emerging Pictures, to develop necessary new prospects for contemporary film distribution. Packaging quality movies together this way takes the pressure off a single release to rule the marketplace. These new visions are so adventurous they haven’t yet developed a cult. The good news is that they break ground and change standards.

In Our Name, Africa United, Neds and Toast (among others in the series) imaginatively render what’s occurring in England’s national consciousness. Subjects range from sexual relations to international warfare and the body politic to colonialism (still) and class division (still). The filmmakers don’t cop out, as Sundancers do, with the diminished genre of documentary; these fictional dramas and comedies are works of the imagination but rooted in a modern reality that they illuminate.

Debs Gardner-Paterson’s Africa United follows a group of Rwandan children who discover ways to survive their distanced, beamish response to Obama and unavoidable awareness of AIDS. Gardner-Paterson has charming rapport with her young cast. She sees genocide and epidemics with a moral complexity and palpable optimism it would do Spielberg honor to promote.

Brian Welsh’s In Our Name is an extraordinary view of Iraq and Afghanistan soldiers who return home hoping to decompress in a troubled domestic environment. It enhances what Stop- Loss, The Hurt Locker and Jim Sheridan’s Brothers only began to explore. Welsh substitutes wartime ambiguity for postwar anxiety. Moving characterizations by Joanne Froggatt and Mel Raido— who play a married couple, the latter suffering from a PTS disorder—remind one how actors personify modern tensions. Dedicated to those incarcerated Brit veterans who can’t get over the wars, it suggests something from Off-Broadway that forges ahead into our troubled times.

Peter Mullan’s Neds examines British sociopathy with terror and empathy for the non-P.C. subject of working-class masochism. Its honesty embarrasses the patronization in a U.S. indie art-project like Putty Hill by turning political failure inward—telling the personal story of young John McGill (Conor McCarron) emulating his dreadful role-models—and making it poetic. After his appalling The Magdalene Sisters, Mullan returns to the beauty and stirring mystery of his 1998 debut, Orphans.

S.J. Clarkson’s Toast advances similar concerns through a comic biography of food writer Nigel Slater, while also innovating a compellingly strange template for the expression of gay sensibility. Starting with Slater’s gay childhood (a controversial approach handled sensitively, credibly, amusingly), Toast gives an original account of how emotions and taste are developed. Young Nigel is first played by Oscar Kennedy then Freddie Highmore, each an age-perfect representative of evolving pubescence.

Toast’s theme—charting Nigel’s rivalry with his stepmother, Helena Bonham Carter’s Mrs. Potter—is classic. Through a figurative and literal "fairy" tale, Clarkson uncannily represents the awkward ways kids misconstrue the adult world on the way to their own problematic maturity. This happens to be the same subject as Richard Ayoade’s Submarine—a dreary Brit-indie version of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore. But Submarine has all the faults that plague American indies: smug, narcissistic, unimaginative and aesthetically glum. Clarkson, however, spots his subject’s narcissism and shows uniquely humorous distance. Toast is not snarky, nor camp. Nigel’s sentimental education includes references to pop culture as a nurturing form. It richly underscores Nigel’s ambitions—exposing Submarine’s one-dimensional perception.

One of Submarine’s biggest insults—aside from the repulsive lead characterizations by Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige—is Ayoade’s snide tribute to Welsh pop music that leaves out the great Shirley Bassey. Toast becomes a landmark in gay and youth portraiture because of its gay-sensibility details (the songs of Dusty Springfield provide an important social and feminist subtext) that reveal the things we’re not supposed to discuss anymore: Nigel’s complex envy and admiration, talent and pettiness. It corrects The Hours: The Pet Shop Boys would approve.

Submarine’s narrowness typifies what afflicts much contemporary (especially "independent") filmmaking. But not Toast, in which Bonham Carter’s irresistible performance is blessed in one scene by sunlight coming from behind a cloud— serendipity that matches Clarkson’s generosity. Nothing so frankly beautiful occurs in the depressive Submarine, proof that Ayoade’s a poor ambassador for British cinema, while the films in From Britain With Love are a terrific, inspiring place to start.

If these were one big film, they’d equal Nashville or Middlemarch, yet they’re individually impressive. Both Toast and Neds contain
powerful scenes of unexpected parent-child reconciliation— the opposite
of commercial pandering. All of these movies show up American cinema as
formulaic and paltry; subject to political correctness and cowardly
approaches to the central issues that concern contemporary humanity. At a
moment when most movies disappoint, these films are refreshing and
enlightening. Or as Clarkson wonderfully demonstrates, when life hands
you lemons, make Toast.

>>From Britain With Love

At Film Society of Lincoln Center & IFC Center June 25–July 9

Submarine

Directed by Richard Ayoade Runtime: 97 min.