The Thousand Eyes of Dr. MacBuse
RED ROAD, chapter two. Good thing the filmmakers helpfully divided their movie into episodes so I could watch it over several days.*
Last seen, Kate Dickie was starting to sort-of-stalk a fellow called Clyde (Tony Curran) newly released from prison. After another 24 minute installment, that’s still all that’s happening, but she is now doing her stalking at (very) close quarters, rather than relying on her security cameras. There’s been more extremely nice, atmospheric photography, and the revelation that while she knows who he is, he’s never seen her before in his puff. So the plot has coagulated just a touch.
Co-stars Martin Compston and Natalie Press have appeared. The latter dumps half a tin of dog food directly onto the kitchen floor for her puppy to chow down on, and I am genuinely impressed by the inventive squalor of this. Almost everybody in the film still seems to be suffering from clinical depression. Kate Dickie is actually one of the liveliest, with Compston bringing some of his colossal charm to bear, and Press has a spasming, out-of-control face that seems to be obeying the dictates of some alien power, which makes her disconcerting yet pleasurable to watch, as she was in MY SUMMER OF LOVE (I do like SOME modern British cinema).
The pace is starting to wear me out — the relentlessly SLOW pace. Not that events are spectacularly drawn-out, or that nothing’s happening, but nothing of clear significance is happening. If we’re heading for an amazing revelation, one feels that it had better be amazingly amazing. My spirits are at a low ebb, and then Kate Dickie throws up in an elevator. Lovely. A basic staple of entertainment, something no truly Scottish film can be without: somebody heaving their guts up in a confined space.
I stop the disc and run off to see Jancsó’s THE ROUND-UP at Filmhouse. More later.
*They did no such thing.
