Red Road, the arresting first feature by Andrea Arnold (who won a best-short-film Oscar for Wasp) takes place in a world where the daily activities of citizens are subject to constant surveillance. That is, it takes place in an ordinary city — Glasgow, as it happens — at the present time. The dire Orwellian warning that Big Brother is watching has evolved from a grim fantasy of totalitarianism into a banal fact of life, in democratic as well as in authoritarian societies. The security cameras fastened on lampposts and the sides of buildings, after all, are put there with our safety in mind, and we have learned to view them with more reassurance than alarm when we notice them at all.
It is fitting, then, that Arnold's interest in the phenomenon of surveillance is less political than psychological. At the center of her film is Jackie (Kate Dickie), who works in a police observation center called City Eye where she sits in front of a wall of video monitors, punching a keyboard and toggling a joystick to pan and zoom across a disjointed panorama of urban life. Jackie is like a moviegoer and, given her ability to edit and refine the images she collects, like a filmmaker as well. Right from the start, then, the director, the heroine and the audience are all implicated in a queasy, curious game of intimate spying.
Jackie's voyeuristic tendencies at first seem fairly benign, and the familiarity she feels with other Glaswegians looks more like fellow-feeling than prurience. She smiles in sympathy at a man walking his ailing bulldog, and in amusement at an office cleaner dancing with her headphones on. But Jackie is also lonely, and clearly suffering. The anonymous people she watches are all the human contact she can stand, apart from the occasional bout of perfunctory sex with a co-worker and an awkward encounter with her former in-laws.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF CINEPLEX
Arnold allows the details of Jackie's situation to emerge gradually and obliquely, as much through gesture and implication as through dialogue. The specifics of her grief — she is mourning both a husband and a child — are less important than the mood. Dickie, tall and stoop-shouldered, with an angular face that refuses to acknowledge its own beauty, never overdoes the character's numb sadness. The depth of it is not evident until, one evening at work, one of the cameras picks up the face of a man named Clyde (Tony Curran) who is obviously (though for a long time enigmatically) connected with the destruction of Jackie's family.
He is a burly, ginger-haired ex-convict — thuggish but not entirely without decency or charm — who lives in a high-rise housing project the address of which gives the movie its title. He serves as a kind of surrogate big brother for an excitable young man named Stevie (Martin Compston) and his girlfriend, April (Natalie Press). As Jackie begins to stalk Clyde, using the resources of her job to keep track of his comings and goings, she enters a murky ethical zone, and the movie treads into the boggy terrain of melodrama.
A credit at the end notes that Arnold worked on the film at the Sundance Institute, and as its plot accelerates, some Sundance hallmarks — in particular a familiar dialectic of abjection and redemption — become visible. But if the story falters toward the end, Arnold's filmmaking never does. Her style of shooting and editing is like a more artful, more expressive adaptation of the fuzzy, haphazard movements of the surveillance cameras. Like Jackie, she restlessly reframes and adjusts her images, nudging them to disclose latent or hidden meanings. Her deft juxtaposition of sound and silence — the City Eye cameras have no accompanying ears — adds to the atmosphere of paranoia and dislocation.
And Arnold's control is matched by Dickie's. A well-regarded British television actress making her first appearance in a feature, she is a haunted, haunting presence, keeping an almost terrifying intensity hidden just beneath her drab exterior. As Jackie moves closer to Clyde, crashing one of his parties, hanging out at his local pub, it is hard to tell what, if anything, she has planned. Is she after revenge? Reconciliation? Or is she even aware of what she wants, or what she's doing? Dickie's achievement, and Arnold's, is to hold all of these possibilities in suspension, so that you feel you are watching someone approaching an impossible, dangerous choice.
It feels almost inappropriate to witness such agony at such close range, but it is also a form of poetic justice, given Jackie's profession and her abuse of it. Beyond that, the queasy mixture of sympathy and curiosity that Red Road evokes is evidence of a talented, risk-taking filmmaker discovering her power.
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