It was Lars Von Trier’s idea for three directors to make their debut feature films, using the same characters and each shooting on digital cameras in Glasgow. Red Road is the first of these out of the blocks.
The parameters of the challenge are less interesting, however, than the simple reality of what Andrea Arnold has made of Glasgow. For she, and her cameraman Robbie Ryan, have produced a portrait of desolate city life – of scruffy pedestrian streets, wasteland sex and neon-lit loneliness – which is creepy, depressing, yet thoroughly compelling.
There is a raw quality to their depiction of the real Red Road estate: we can almost smell the rubbish that is strewn everywhere, the grease of the café, and the cigarette and lager staleness of a seedy flat after a party. This is the setting for an intriguing cat and mouse chase, in which the mouse has no idea he’s being pursued.
Jackie (Kate Dickie) is a CCTV operator with the police who, when not glued to her screens, leads a joyless single life of TV dinners and empty, adulterous sex. One night she recognises the man in front of her screen, following him from one camera to the next as he roams Red Road. A few days later this very personal surveillance steps into the light – as Jackie travels to the estate to, effectively, stalk him.
Who is Clyde (Tony Curran), what has he done to Jackie, and what exactly are her intentions? Arnold takes her time with the answers. In the meantime, Jackie’s immersion into the feral, possibly dangerous womaniser’s world becomes more and more intense, until she herself catches Clyde’s amorous eye.
Dickie gives a potent performance as the unfathomable, but clearly traumatised Jackie; the actress showing her daring in an incredibly frank sex scene, whose emotional ambivalence is possibly more shocking than its explicitness. While Dickie keeps an iron grip on our attention, around her Arnold constructs a tense, thought-provoking thriller, with its discomforting vision of city life under the voyeuristic gaze of people with clicking joysticks, in darkened rooms.
A powerful drama from a major new talent that scooped a rare British triumph at Cannes when it took home the Prix du Jury prize.
One day, watching the monitors, she sees a man she knows but is trying to forget and is soon helplessly outside her jurisdiction, stalking the man, on camera, back to his flat. Eventually she crosses the line and goes to the address. Great performances, an involving plot and imaginative direction make this one of the best British films of recent years.
Andrea Arnold had previously made the Academy Award-winning short film, 'Wasp' (available on Cinema 16: World Short Films).
