A land of rampant cliché
Andrew O'Hagan finds Samuel L Jackson and a parade of British actors are wasted amid the dismal platitudes of The 51st State
12:00AM GMT 07 Dec 2001
BAD British films and bad films about Britain have something in common: they elevate the banal as if it were a higher kind of reality, and they heap on clichés at the expense of sophisticated stories and interesting lives. From the 1940s to the mid-'60s, British films, even the bad ones, looked and sounded like Britain, so much so that they often opened up parts of Britain to the British themselves. Nowadays, most films set here leave you with a feeling of mistaken identity: they are cultureless little artifacts with no reason to exist, except for the possibility of earning dough for Americans who think that Dundee is nothing more than a type of fruit cake and Ipswich the name of the flying ball-game in Harry Potter.
| Rhys Ifans and Samuel L Jackson in The 51st State: every situation in Ronny Yu's film is spurious, every scene is composed of degenerate platitudes too useless even to raise a laugh |
The 51st State
is a film set in what passes for Liverpool, and its terrible clichés draw sustenance from the idea that Britain is now part of the USA, a sort of theme park of bad food, broken teeth, golf and violence. But even dunderheaded films these days need a semblance of emotional reason - and we get that in the form of Elmo McElroy (Samuel L Jackson) , whose hopes of a career as a licensed pharmacologist end in 1971, when, as a bright chemistry graduate we see him getting caught smoking pot while driving. By 2001 when we meet him again, we see that our friend has now cut his losses and become a manufacturer of illegal drugs.
Then he tries to kill his boss, The Lizard (Meat Loaf) , and flies to Liverpool to sell his new drug formula for $20 million. And that is when the fun really starts. This "Liverpool". What a place. Our hero is black and he wears a kilt. He comes into Arrivals with a bag of golf clubs (you just know that someone is going to get clobbered sooner or later) and is met by a morose scally called Felix DeSouza (Robert Carlyle), an expert at aggressive smoking and supporting all things Scouse. Felix, though, is like Quentin Crisp compared to some of the Nazi skinheads who are out to trounce McElroy. After several punchings and a killing, Felix manages to get his American friend into a hotel suite where Felix's boss, the drug baron Durant (Ricky Tomlinson) is waiting to do a big deal. Meanwhile, Felix's old girlfriend, Dakota (Emily Mortimer), a bit of an assassin in debt to The Lizard, zips around the place getting on everyone's nerves.
When a film is well-written, well-acted, and well-made, it could be about someone crossing the room to make a cup of tea, it could be about the tiniest thing, but when a film is rubbish it tends to pile more and more on, desperately trying to cover more of the world, more "characters", more possibilities, to hide the fact that what you're watching is nonsense. Every other minute a half-character hovers into view in The 51st State - usually, it's somebody who used to be in Brookside - but they have nothing to do except maybe wince occasionally or fire off a gun. Usually they just stand around talking balls.
Celebrated Hong Kong action director Ronny Yu is responsible for this film. As you would expect, he takes good care of the stunts - flying cars, exploding buildings, multiple wounds - and overall he has a deeper interest in guns than he does in people. That would be fine, except that every situation in the film is spurious; every scene is composed of degenerate platitudes too useless even to raise a laugh. After Felix's bosses suffer some gratuitous injury, Felix and McElroy become accidental buddies, on the look-out for some new drug dealer to buy McElroy's formula. They meet this person in Iki, another thick pothead and ageing raver played by Rhys Ifans, and the scene is set for some major con.
It is easy to understand how Samuel L Jackson would accept this movie: a) he's the producer, b) he gets to be the star of the show, and c) he would think that some of this Limey comedy stuff was quite cute. Ricky Tomlinson's presence is harder to understand: isn't being a genius on The Royle Family enough for him?
But the real mystery here is why an actor as interesting as Robert Carlyle would accept something like this. Robert De Niro spends his life with intelligent people - he meets novelists and dramatists, he speaks to directors with vision, he reads every day and takes an interest in the world. All the way through his career he has kept a watch on the words, and on where good ideas are coming from: he is an expert husbander of his own talent. Robert Carlyle should take a class in the De Niro methodology, for Carlyle seems to spend for ever worrying about things like press intrusion, when those hours would be better spent worrying about the persistent intrusion of utter rubbish into his career as an actor.
I don't know what he wants, but I know what he can do when he's on form: he is an actor who should be working on intelligent, well-written movies made by the best directors, small films with passion, and saying goodbye to this stuff for good.
Catherine Breillat, on the other hand, is a French director who specialises in small films with passion, the only problem being her reputation as a shock-auteur. It's a reputation she neither wants nor needs, but one, nevertheless, that is borne out by the content of her latest film A Ma Soeur! (For My Sister). Breillat is interested in how feminism both describes and fails to describe sisterhood. She is also taken up, as she was in her last film, Romance, with issues of questionable sexual liaisons, voyeurism and hunger of several kinds.
The film tells the story (a sort of dream-story) of two sisters, Elena (Roxane Mesquida), 15, and Anais (Anais Reboux), 12, who are on holiday at the seaside with their parents. Elena brings an Italian law student home and they begin a process that leads to sex; meanwhile, Anais is watching from the other bed, pretending to be asleep. Elena is thin and beautiful and Anais is fat and always hungry. The sisters are rivalrous but also they are strange inversions of one another: sex and food are both comforts to them and also, one suspects, the focal points of hysteria. Anais wonders what it would be like to lose her virginity to a stranger.
There was a bit of a scuffle at the British Board of Film Classification over A Ma Soeur!. "The board was concerned," they tell me, "about the appearance of a 13-year-old actress [Reboux] in some scenes in the film where sexual activity was inferred. A leading QC experienced in the interpretation of the Protection of Children Act watched the film and advised that it was not indecent."
Not indecent, but not very successful either. Though Breillat is often thoughtful and suggestive, this film is a nasty piece of work, ending not only in a puzzling excess of violence but in a heartless victory for Anais.
The film is bloated with the kind of existentialism that bright teenagers used to find irresistible. In a week when clichés of Britishness are rampant, we get a reminder that French clichés are no picnic either.
