Funny Man – review

A weird, wonderful and quintessentially British treat, says Sloame Ocean

The titular Funny Man

FUNNY MAN (1994)

DIRECTOR: Simon Sprackling

COUNTRY: UK

RUNNING TIME: 90 mins

WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Monty Python, League of Gentlemen

AH, the horror-comedy: so rarely scary, so rarely funny. When done well, we get a film as sublime as AnAmerican Werewolf in London.  When done badly, the scares lack bite and the jokes fall flat.

One rare exception to this rule is Simon Sprackling’s subversive 1994 debut, Funny Man, a uniquely British film that mixes scenes of splatstick gore with an utterly twisted sense of humour.

The film opens with a prologue in which coke-snorting record producer Max Taylor (Benny Young) wins the keys to Callum Chance’s (Christopher Lee) ancestral home in a game of poker. Taylor wastes no time in deciding to move his family into the place. However, shortly after arriving, Taylor’s wife (Ingrid Lacey) informs him that she has no intention of living in the house and, as she’s ‘too rich to be unhappy’, Taylor acquiesces.

He informs her that as soon as his brother Johnny (Matthew Devitt) arrives with their possessions, they can be on their way. Johnny turns out to be a failed guitar hero fated to spend his days lamenting what could have been and operating a removal business.

On his way to the mansion, he picks up four hitchhikers: the Hard Man (Chris Walker), a misogynistic northerner; the Crap Puppeteer (George Morton), whose specialty is a politically correct version of Punch and Judy; the Psychic Commando (Pauline Black), a tarot-card reading Jamaican and finally, Thelma Fudd, (Rhona Cameron) a bird-watching nerd who bears an uncanny resemblance to Velma from Scooby-Doo.

As Taylor’s family kills time waiting for Johnny’s arrival by exploring the house – a wonderfully eerie location strewn with joker and other assorted playing card imagery – they come across a game room. One quick spin of a wheel later and the Funny Man (Tim James), a kind of demonic jester, emerges from the structure of the house itself and begins a murderous rampage that will occupy the remainder of the film.

The sub-genre to which Funny Man bares most resemblance is the slasher: one by one a group of characters is stalked, isolated and killed by a homicidal maniac. But the rules of the slasher typically require that we have at least one character with whom to identify, in most cases the Final Girl of Carol J Clover’s seminal discussion of the genre, Men, Women and Chainsaws. Yet in Funny Man, there are no real hero figures for us to get behind. The only viable option comes in the form of the Psychic Commando and while she comes closest to disrupting the Funny Man’s antics, she ultimately proves no match for him.

As with any such effort, not everything here works, but when it works, it works well

As such, Sprackling offers us no choice but to root for the Funny Man himself. Sure, he’s a violent killer, but he’s a lot more charismatic than Jason Voorhees ever was and he gets the funniest lines here. Fortunately, Tim James is more than up to the job that the role demands of him: his performance is an anarchic thrill. Whether he’s casually strolling the corridors and grounds of the house, hunch-backed and endowed with an over-sized phallus, or dressed in drag performing a most alarming striptease at Club Sexy’s Psychedelic Wig Evening, James is a delight. As the film progresses, the Funny Man dispatches the rest of the cast in a number of remarkably creative ways,  while directly addressing the audience in a manner that makes us complicit in his actions.

Reviews at the time of the film’s original release compared it to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, an analogy which makes complete sense: the humour is undoubtedly British and more often than not, surreal. More significantly though, once the Funny Man appears, the film soon settles into something of a sketch-show rhythm. As with any such effort, not everything here works, but when it works, it works well.

Its ambitions are occasionally betrayed by its low budget, the film drags at times and the final 15 minutes are somewhat anti-climactic. Nevertheless, James’ gleefully manic performance more than makes up for these shortcomings and a willing audience will find much to enjoy here;  Funny Man is an irreverent treasure ripe for rediscovery.

The Arbor – review

An unconventional docu-drama about playwright Andrea Dunbar, her family and her estate during and after her life is unusual and captivating, says Sean Lightbown

Lorraine and Lisa portrayed by Manjinder Virk and Christine Bottomley

The Arbor (2010)

DIRECTOR: Clio Barnard

COUNTRY: UK

WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974, Raining Stones

Behind my house as a kid there was a field. It wasn’t big – maybe enough for two games of jumpers -for-goalposts football at a push – but it was enough to muck about on. On Saturdays the local kids and I would descend on it like locusts. It’d usually be football or tig, but sometimes we snuck into a neighbouring house’s back garden to climb one of its enormous 20 foot-plus trees. If you managed to negotiate the brambles and twigs and cuts and bruises and ever got to the top, you would see a vast, endless parade of terraced houses and tarmac. And then your mum would shout you in for tea.

These memories coming back was one of only a series of surprises with The Arbor, Clio Barnard’s first feature film from 2010. It is part documentary, part drama, telling the story of playwright prodigy Andrea Dunbar, a working-class Yorkshire lass whose plays, written from the tender age of fifteen, managed to find themselves played in London and New York theatres. And, in the case of her work Rita, Sue and Bob Too, becoming a feature film itself.

The fact that this unorthodox narrative doesn’t become tiring is a testament to the power of the story and indeed the performances of the actors

Yet to limit The Arbor as a portrayal of this colourful, brutal and tragic life – Dunbar died at the age of 29, leaving three kids from three different fathers – would be to do it a disservice. What we see for most of the film is her family and friends’ depiction of life on The Arbor – the estate road from which the play and film’s name comes from – how each of them saw it, and how each of them went on in life.

However, we do not see a Ken Loach-esque ‘warts and all’ portrayal. Instead, Barnard decided to use real-life interviews, and get actors to lip-sync them for the documentary. The result is an extremely powerful tale spanning generations of tragedy, regret and, in the end, some form of redemption.

‘Tale’ is the key word. While this is a documentary, we are constantly reminded throughout about how subjective personal accounts are. Andrea’s eldest daughter Lorraine, played superbly by Majinder Virk, provides consistently painful, hateful and sometimes chilling memories from her past and present. This is balanced well with accounts from her sister, Lisa (Christine Bottomley), whose almost-cheerful nature about her mother’s writing provides a clear antithesis. The effect of this, plus several other similar scenes involving Andrea’s siblings, friends and lovers, is that we’re challenged. We are given several accounts of the same events, but from different perspectives, and it is up to us to decide. Indeed, the opening sequence, featuring two dogs in a field chewing over what remains in a charred bonfire, is shot in such a way that you feel you are being pulled into a dream. In a recurring motif, scenes from Dunbar’s The Arbor play are acted out on the estate itself, with a crowd of (I assume) local residents gathered around watching and reacting. Fiction is being mixed with reality, and we are reminded that what we are watching is retelling and opinion, not wholly undisputed fact.

All this wouldn’t matter, however, if the stories and performances weren’t so compelling. From Lorraine and Lisa’s childhood memories you are drawn into a very dark and personal journey through these people’s lives and the life of the estate itself. We grow up with them, get in touch with their anger, and hear their reasonings and regrets. Alongside this sits several instances where actors perform sections of Dunbar plays in front of current residents of The Arbor, not only reminding us of the film’s insistence on blurring reality and fiction, but also showing us Dunbar’s dramatizations of life on the estate.

The fact that this unorthodox narrative doesn’t become tiring is a testament to the power of the story and indeed the performances of the actors. Bottomley and Virk’s portrayals of the two sisters – one filled with hope, the other regret and anger – are compelling, and they somehow manage to play off each other despite rarely occupying the screen together. The supporting performances are also strong, helping to provide more rounded, and on occasion, completely different, accounts of events, constantly keeping you wondering.

The Arbor is a brave movie, not only in subject matter but also in its execution. It is at once abstract and yet grounded. Where it is intangible it is also personal. It is quite original and, more often that not, brilliant.

Kiss the Water – review

A documentary about an eccentric fishing-fly maker from the Highlands may appear niche, but Steve Dallimore finds heart in this dreamlike tale.

Fly-making – a labour of love

KISS THE WATER (2013)

DIRECTOR: Eric Steel

COUNTRY: USA, UK

RUNNING TIME: 103 mins

WATCH IT IF YOU LIKE:  The Bridge, Bending Steel

IT’S often the mark of a good documentary that the film appeals to people with no real interest in the subject matter. So, when making Kiss the Water, a film about fly fishing in the Scottish Highlands, director Eric Steel must have either been supremely confident of making a good film or intent on appealing to a very niche audience.

The film is only Steel’s second after 2006’s The Bridge, a thought-provoking if morally dubious piece on suicide at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. While it’s understandable that he’s chosen a much lighter subject matter, the initial concern is that fly fishing may be a little too insubstantial to warrant 82 minutes of the viewer’s time.

Kiss the Water focus, however, is expert fly (a small fishhook tied with small colourful threads to act as bait) maker Megan Boyd, and when Steel explains that he first heard of Boyd when her obituary was published in the New York Times, it becomes clear that there’s more to her than to your average fly tier (if such a thing exists).

Despite rarely leaving the Highlands Megan Boyd’s expertise was of world renown, leading to royal appointment by Prince Charles and eventually an OBE. That Boyd declined to collect her OBE because of a conflicting prior engagement (she was due to attend a bridge game with a group of friends on the same evening) indicates the other reason she makes for a compelling subject: by any measure, she was an eccentric character. Boyd dressed in full suit and tie for her work and made any journeys for supplies by motorcycle in an era when few women drove at all.

Large parts of the film are made up of long, atmospheric shots of the Scottish countryside and innovative animated sequences, lending Kiss the Water a dreamlike air

That Steel eschews traditional documentary format to tell the story of a very non-traditional life is a masterstroke. While the film utilises talking heads to provide some insight into Megan’s life, large parts of the film are made up of long, atmospheric shots of the Scottish countryside and innovative animated sequences, lending Kiss the Water a dreamlike air, similar to Terrence Malick or the more meditative works of Gus Van Sant. Rather than being a point A to point B story, it feels more like a patchwork assembly of memories, and it’s all the better for it.

Conspicuous by her absence is Boyd herself, who only features once in the film. While to an extent this was due to a lack of usable photos or footage (Boyd retired in 1985 and died in 2001) there’s enough in the film to suggest it was also a stylistic decision.

Steel explains at the outset that there are two sorts of fishing stories; the one that you caught and the one that got away. It’s the latter that best describes Steel’s portrayal of Boyd; she’s the one that can never be measured or truly understood, the one whose story will always remain incomplete but is nonetheless worth telling, if only to let imagination fill the gaps the sparse facts can’t fill.

The film isn’t without its flaws. There’s a small segment that suggests an allegorical connection to Princess Diana that is poorly judged, badly realised and thoroughly unnecessary. The film’s ponderous pace and elegiac tone come perilously close to outstaying their welcome in its comparatively brief running time, but as this is only the second film of what is hopefully a fledgling documentary career for Steel, these are forgivable missteps.

The film’s tone and subject matter mean it clearly won’t be for everyone, but Steel has done an admirable job of turning what could have been a special interest curiosity into a charming, fascinating portrait of a truly unique individual. Indeed, it seems appropriate that the film should have as broad an appeal; as one of Boyd’s friends explains, she never enjoyed fishing either.