SEEING RED

Voyeur’s delight…

Andrea Arnold is clearly a burgeoning talent. If last month’s Fish Tank was something of a revelation, her feature debut, 2006’s Red Road – which I finally caught up with last night – proves it’s far from a flash in the pan. Like Fish Tank it was both written and directed by Arnold, but this time under a whole series of restrictions imposed by the Dogme-inspired Advance Party. In short, this was for three writer-directors to make separate films featuring the same nine characters, played by the same actors. Major characters in one film turn to minor figures in another, with no restrictions on tone or genre. Oddly, but no matter here, the other films in this series have failed to materialise.

Red Road’s plot centres around the withdrawn and skinny CCTV operator Jackie (Kate Dickie, a sort of Caledonian PJ Harvey). While not manning the massed banks of video screens for City Eye Control, her life seems broken, almost in stasis, her work a buffer from the real world, save for occasional bouts of loveless sex in the Land Rover of a married colleague. Hints of the bigger darkness engulfing her slowly begin to emerge when she attends a relative’s wedding and engages in a stilted, slightly cryptic exchange with an older man whose significance is, initially, frustratingly aloof.

The humdrum, vicious circle of her life is split asunder when a working Jackie spies a girl she suspects is about to be sexually assaulted on some wasteland. She’s about to phone it in but stops in her tracks when she realises the act is consensual. As she zooms in for the close-up a dim hint of recognition crosses her features. It’s clear she knows who the ginger male chugging gleefully away is, but she’s also spooked and rendered incredulous by it.

Tracking ginger quickly becomes Jackie’s obsession. She has a leap on her quarry through all the surveillance techniques at her fingertips, though almost at the expense of her job – at one point missing a near fatal stabbing. She eventually traces the man we have now learned is Clyde Henderson (Tony Curran, a sort of Caledonian Mick Hucknell) back to the titular Red Road flats, where she follows and eventually, excruciatingly, confronts him.

Arnold keeps the viewer on tenterhooks throughout. The full story only unfurls in dribs and drabs, and she piles on the darkness to ensure the viewer feels the full electric snap and crackle of tension when Jackie and Clyde finally confront each other face-to-face. As with Fish Tank, Arnold’s flair for seemingly natural dialogue shines through – the script is sparing throughout, with zero flab but bags of gristle. And as with her social realist filmmaking forbears the sex scenes are raw and unflinching (although best to not extend those earlier Hucknell and Harvey comparisons without first packing a voluminous sickbag).

And if all this sounds somewhat grim and far from dinner at the Ritz, none of that was advertised on the brochure (indeed, there’s a beautiful simplicity and almost calming solemnity to the American fly poster for the film – see top of post). Arnold coaxes credible, cogent performances from Dickie and Curran – with strong support from Clyde’s hair-trigger sweetie/psycho pal Stevie (Martin Compston) and dim-witted girlfriend April (Natalie Press) – somehow managing to fashion a cathartic coda from a seeming impossible premise. That triumph would elude lesser talents and is further proof that all eyes should stay trained on this fiery, precocious filmmaker.