Greene Youth

It was kind of startling to see, last time I looked at WALKABOUT, how pervy it was. The male gaze was front and centre, yanking on the zoom bar at inappropriate moments. I may try to write something about it next time, because it hasn’t really been discussed, and Nic Roeg’s gone now, alas, so he won’t be offended. I think the film probably is still very strong, but its curiosity about Jenny Agutter’s body is not quite either scientific or innocent.

I START COUNTING features a really astonishing performance from WALKABOUT’s young female star, Jenny Agutter, and is, at least in comparison with the more celebrated Roeg film, a tad more discrete. Anything approaching nudity or undressing is either brief or carefully framed to avoid overt titillation. Still, Greene’s background in commercials and the combined skill of him and the talented Alex Thompson on camera tend to make the film look like a compilation of product shots from advertisements for fiteen-year-old schoolgirls (“Get yours today!”) It lacks Roeg’s more overt salaciousness, or his matter-of-fact in-your-faceness, but can’t quite eliminate that voyeuristic effect.

It should be about the FEMALE gaze — and it is — but Greene can’t efface his own way of looking.

The gloss (lots of white paint on everything courtesy of designer Brian Eatwell) is positive in some ways, because I START COUNTING is a serial killer thriller that never looks or feels like one. The slightly incessant song helps there too. And the dreamy attitude of the main character makes this entirely appropriate — schoolgirl Wynne wants to identify the man who’s murdering girls in her neighbourhood, but it’s obvious that she’s not primarily intent on bringing him to justice. It’s more like the reformation fantasy.

All Wynne’s ill-advised behaviour makes her a frustrating character to root for, but the downplaying of overt tension (gentle Basil Kirchin idylls rather than Bernard Herrmann pounding thrills) helps stop us giving up on her in irritation. The film’s real subject is adolescence, not murder, just as SEBASTIAN was a love story only incidentally concerned with codebreaking.

I START COUNTING stars Nurse Alex Price; Captain Potter; Young Winston; Dr. Branom; Mrs Sannerson; Doctor Seward; and Buster.

The Mystery of the Panting Schoolgirls

So what’s going on here?

Let me backtrack. Revisiting Nic Roeg’s early, funny ones is always surprising because I find myself seeing things I hadn’t seen before — usually because the BBC censored them. WALKABOUT is a case in point. I knew it had a big long nude swim by teenage Jenny Agutter, but I didn’t recall how fervidly interested in her knickers the director clearly was. It’s upskirt all the way when Roeg’s about.

But the films are certainly great, and intriguing. Full of mysteries. WALKABOUT begins in typical elliptical fashion, with that perfect brick wall tracking shot which will eventually come back and take us out into the outback. And then there’s a classroom full of panting schoolgirls.

I get false memory syndrome every time I see this. I was a school kid in the seventies, you see, and I keep thinking I remember doing this, that I know what it is, that it’s not just some bollocks Roeg invented to weird us out and make us look at schoolgirls panting. Is it breathing exercises for a language class or something, or yogic exercises (“Start every day with a breath of fire!”) Later, they hum “Mmmmm!” and chant “A-E-I-O-U” so I’m guessing the ritual is linguistic in purpose.

I don’t necessarily want you to write in with boring answers. Sometimes an interesting mystery is preferable. But on the other hand… I am curious.

Ready…Steady…

Jenny Agutter, as 15-yr-old Wynne Kinch (great name!), starts to suspect that her foster brother, with whom she’s in love, may be the local serial killer.

“Is this bringing your childhood back in a sudden Proustian rush?” I asked Fiona after five minutes of I START COUNTING. It was. Maybe the most personally evocative seventies childhood movie I’ve seen, (although it’s from 1969, when I was two) apart from things I actually saw during my own seventies childhood, which evoke feelings of nostalgia and terror due to their precise connection to my memory of seeing them then. This was my first time watching START COUNTING, as my badly cropped copy seems to be called (starring “Jenny Agutt”), so the resonance was more with the precise details of design, social behaviour, and evocation of early-mid teenagerhood.

Design — this was by the brilliant Brian Eatwell, whose biggest job in the 70s was Richard Lester’s THE THREE MUSKETEERS and sequel (attach wooden scaffolding to ruins, make them look like they’re under constrcution!), but he also designed several of Greene’s films: MADAME SIN, a failed TV pilot with Bette Davis as a sort of female Fu Manchu — if only this had been picked up!) THE STRANGE AFFAIR, which I have a ratty copy of, unwatched, and GODSPELL. Here he makes a church look like a space station, but still keeps it believable. He also did those amazing art-deco sets for the DR PHIBES films —

— which leads us to jazz genius Basil Kirchin, who scored this with its haunting theme song, and also wrote the music played by Dr. Phibes’ clockwork orchestra. Kirchin’s stuff always makes me think of drifting downstream in a punt, trailing my fingers in the water, probably in soft focus. But in a good way.

Social observation — START COUNTING was filmed in the same Berkshire new town where Sidney Lumet made THE OFFENCE. Greene, a Canadian, and Lumet, an Unistater, find cinematic values in these drab UK surroundings that seem to elude most of out homegrown filmmakers: it’s striking how many of the great images of Britain were directed by outsiders. A bit more recently, I was struck by the epic sweep Atom Egoyan brought to our motorways in FELICIA’S JOURNEY. The film’s flawed, but he really got a look going in it, using precisely the kind of places we Brits might dismiss as unphotogenic, or else use only for their grimness.

Apart from the very particular sense of suburban-village-sprawl nowhere, there’s the dialogue, which is peppered with teenage fantasy and blunt period tastelessness: reflecting on the recent spate of murders, Agutter’s brother muses, “He might at least rape them, it seems such a waste.” Whereas in an Italiasn giallo this unbelievably crass remark might be part of an overall seediness and misogyny, here it just seems the kind of thing an insensitive young man in that environment might say, with a slight “Tsk,” from his mum the only rebuttal.

Jenny Agutter: astonishing. I mean, astonishing.

There is an ever-present risk of exploitation and tackiness, since this is about  burgeoning teen sexuality and all, and Greene does originate that shot where the camera follows Agutter’s knickers as she pulls them up her legs, but he doesn’t linger on the action as Nic Roeg would in WALKABOUT, two years later: nothing to see here. On the whole, I thought the film managed to be interested in its subject without leering at it. And some of the teen girlspeak is very funny, especially when Agutter and her best friend exchange confidences in church by speaking their lines with the same rhythm and stress as the catholic liturgy being recited by the rest of the congregation: “What’s he like?” “Tasty.”

Elsewhere in the cast, lovely old Fay Compton from Welles’ OTHELLO and Wise’s THE HAUNTING, unrecognisable in an old bag role, played to the hilt, and by contrast, Simon Ward as a randy bus conductor, who’s very very young indeed. He’s practically an ante-natal Ward, in fact. And Jenny Agutter, who makes everything work. She gets a drunk scene, she gets to behave in slightly random ways, she’s an authentic teen to the hilt, but a very specific, English, Jenny Agutterized teen. We will not see a performance like this again. Makes me realise what an underexploited national resource she is. Remember how there was a Jenny Agutter film or two every year, in which she would be duly nude, and then suddenly she did a clothed cameo in DARKMAN and disappeared? And now you only see her in bit parts on TV? Shocking.

Ou sont les Jenny Agutters d’antan?