Directed by John Crowley, We Live In Time presents a love story where time is in short supply
By Charles Gant
When SunnyMarch commissioned playwright and screenwriter Nick Payne to adapt a book they had in development with Studiocanal, the UK production company might have been fazed by the creative pivot he eventually proposed. “He turned around one day and said, ‘Can I do something else? I’ve got a better idea, and I really, really want to do it.’”
SunnyMarch head of film Leah Clarke is relating the course of events that led to the creation of contemporary British romantic drama We Live In Time, scripted by Payne, directed by John Crowley (Brooklyn), produced by SunnyMarch in association with Shoebox, and starring Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh.
“We were delighted at the idea of Nick doing an original for us, especially something that was romantic and meaningful,” adds Clarke. SunnyMarch took the proposal back to Studiocanal, “and they were very gracious, and were up for it”.
That smooth course of events might seem surprising, given the current focus on adapting existing source material or biographical/historical subjects for the screen – which in Studiocanal’s case include recent hits Back To Black, Wicked Little Letters and The Outrun. And Clarke agrees it was hard to pitch comp titles for the film to Studiocanal and fellow backers A24 (which has North American rights) and Film4. She mentions Silver Linings Playbook and Blue Valentine.
“But those films are American, and that kind of indie [original romantic drama] space doesn’t really exist here [in the UK]. So the only way it was going to get made is if it had two big stars who had terrific chemistry.”
SunnyMarch’s next step was to attach a director, and it reached out to Crowley, director of Payne’s play The Same Deep Water As Me at the Donmar Warehouse in 2013. Payne is best known for play Constellations, which was first produced at the Royal Court Theatre in 2012 and offers a playful perspective on love while stirring in fizzy ideas about science and cosmology as well as a storyline involving terminal illness and assisted dying.
In this adaptation of the John McGahern novel, about a middle-aged man who has returned, with his wife, to the countryside of his childhood, makeshift friendships are forged and life’s grand rhythms observed
By Phil Hoad
Does anything happen, or is it the usual?” asks a regular loose cannon in Pat Collins’ rural-set Irish drama. “Not much in the way of drama, just the day-to-day stuff,” replies his writer friend. That’s very much the lay of the land in this film, with squirely novelist Joe Ruttledge (Barry Ward) serving as a proxy for John McGahern and his early-Joycean realism, and from whose lauded final 2002 novel this is adapted. By extension it speaks for Collins too, who remains a faithful follower of that approach – almost to a fault.
At some point in the 1980s, Joe and his wife Kate (Anna Bederke) – who is from some unspecified European country – have quit London to return to the Irish countryside of his upbringing. With him racking up the pages of a never-finished book, and her twisting local plants into art creations, there’s a bohemian tint to their household that attracts neighbours to their kitchen table. There’s “the Shah” (John Olohan), the big-eyebrowed garage owner tiptoeing into a new romance; Bill (Brendan Conroy), a subdued labourer condemned to working in slave-like conditions because he was “illegitimate”; and the aforementioned loose cannon Patrick (Lalor Roddy), never short of a chippy observation but always popping by like a man who needs company.
Ever-present in this tangle of middle-aged, makeshift friendships is an undertow of faint but inexorable melancholy, occasionally articulated in words (presumably) straight from McGahern. “The rain comes down, the sun shines, the grass grows, children grow old and die – that’s the holy all of it,” reflects the Shah. Nothing too purple, which would violate the terms of the quiet stoicism in the face of life’s grand rhythms admired by McGahern; Collins, more usually a documentarian, keeps in lyrical step with simple, stirring compositions of cloud-swept hillsides, rams teeming down lanes, and one especially moving sequence when Joe lays out a deceased acquaintance for his funeral.
This reserve means the drama verges on indistinct, with bravura camerawork out of bounds and sometimes timid characterisation that threatens to blur the multiple visitors into one Irish version of Ted, The Fast Show’s groundsman. The reticence is a particular issue with Joe and Kate, whose London allegiances, artistic aims and marital state of affairs are alluded to, but never fully explored. But, despite its somewhat diffuse centre, Collins’ film still has a straightforward poignancy, with subtle and dignified performances across the board.
This David Puttnam-produced parable of patriotism, faith and meritocratic success – rereleased in honour of the 1924 event – is on the level of classic Hollywood
By Peter Bradshaw
In honour of both the imminent Paris Olympics and the centenary of the 1924 Olympics, also in Paris, here is a rerelease of this superbly watchable true-story parable of patriotism, faith and meritocratic success within the system, much admired by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden. It was produced by David Puttnam, who had discovered the story of the devout Christian athlete Eric Liddell refusing to run on Sunday and commissioned a terrifically punchy and sympathetic script from Colin Welland (whose victorious Oscar night cry of “the British are coming!” was destined to be endlessly and ironically re-quoted at moments of British failure and disappointment in Hollywood). It was Welland who incorporated Jewish sprinter Harold Abrahams into the film (as well as another gold medallist, Douglas Lowe, who refused any involvement and had to be written out).
The film was directed with gusto by first-time director and former adman Hugh Hudson, an Old Etonian who had a real feeling for how the establishment preens itself. The British Olympic team’s ecstatic barefoot training run on Broadstairs beach is accompanied by the instantly iconic, daringly non-period and trance-inducing synth score by Vangelis, hilariously spoofed by Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean in the London 2012 opening ceremony. And watching the credits again, you might jump at that name just behind Welland and Hudson: young producer Dodi Fayed, given prominence in exchange for cash from his father Mohamed, whose own establishment yearnings were as painful as anything on screen.
Chariots of Fire is the story of two (relative) outsiders, whose stories unfold in parallel, destined to compete alongside each other; they are rivals, teammates but never friends, and in fact they have no meaningful interaction in the drama, though one beats the other in an early heat. Liddell, played by Edinburgh-born stage actor Ian Charleson, is a clean-cut Scots rugby star, athlete and lay preacher, under pressure to resume his family’s missionary work in China. Cheryl Campbell has the rather thankless role of his anxious, querulous sister Jenny. Abrahams, played by the magnificently handsome Ben Cross, is an undergraduate and athlete at Caius, Cambridge, smouldering and simmering with resentment at the antisemitism from the head porter (Richard Griffiths), the Master of Caius, Hugh Kerr Anderson (Lindsay Anderson, no relation) and Master of Trinity JJ Thomson (John Gielgud).
These last two were distinguished scholars and, though unnamed here, the implied slur added to Cambridge University’s displeasure with the production; they were refused permission to film in Trinity College for the uproarious Great Court Run scene, in which Abrahams is imagined to be the first person for 700 years to succeed in this traditional event, running around the court’s perimeter before the clock tolls 12. (In fact, Abrahams never attempted it.) The film made this parochial student lark internationally famous.
Both Liddell and Abrahams infuriate the establishment with their faith and identity. Liddell refuses to run in the 100m because the trials are on a Sunday, and the movie contrives a colossal confrontation between Liddell and the pompous British Olympic committee, before the fictional Lord Andrew Lindsay (Nigel Havers) rescues them by giving up his chance at a second medal to let Liddell take his place in the 400 m on a different day. (In real life, Liddell knew well in advance he wouldn’t be able to compete in the 100m, his best event.)
As for Abrahams, he enrages the snobby bigots by engaging a professional trainer, Sam Mussabini (Ian Holm) – although the movie displays its own amateurist ethos by not showing Mussabini and Abrahams talking about money. Abrahams has a sophisticated, sensual side (which Liddell certainly does not), falling passionately for beautiful singer Sybil Gordon, played by Alice Krige. (This is a mistake on the film’s part; in actuality Abrahams married a different singer, Sybil Evers.)
And so we are taken to the Paris Games, with the original 1924 poster with athletes giving the “Olympic salute” which was retired later when it was co-opted by the fascists. The scene in which Abrahams races the 100m is brilliantly staged by Hudson and editor Terry Rawlings; showing the race once in real time and then immediately again in slo-mo, interspersed with scenes of stunned and dizzied Abrahams. We don’t see the medal ceremony; we glimpse the flag fluttering aloft over the rooftops to the sound of the national anthem, seen from the window of Sam Mussabini’s hotel room which he had discreetly occupied, not wanting to embarrass his quasi-son Abrahams. It is another tremendous dramatic coup.
Chariots of Fire is rare, maybe almost unique, in that it is a British film which really does look and feel like a classic studio-era Hollywood picture.
Viewed with a proverbial pinch of salt, Silvio Narizzano’sGeorgy Girl (1966) is what UK-based media commentator Leanne Weston aptly calls “a comedy of manners turned social critique set amidst the backdrop of ‘Swinging London’”.
It is also, Weston adds in her 2018 essay on the film, “about a world and a girl in transition”, in which the titular character Georgina “Georgy” Parkin (Lynn Redgrave) is portrayed at different times as either “an object of inspiration, affection or ridicule”.
More to the point, though, she is also seen as an object of desire, and it’s this treatment of the protagonist that gives the film’s narrative a sinister undertone as it pretends – in line with The Seekers’ song on which it is partly based – to be a tale about liberation and individualism when in fact, behind its genial facade, it is really one concerning incarceration and servitude.
Or, to put it another way, there’s quite a bit of unpleasant subtext at work in this movie.
Sure – the awkwardly individualistic Georgy has undergone something of a transformation by the end of the film as she achieves what appears to be a form of compromised marital bliss.
But how she gets there does, at times, touch upon the highly dubious.
During the first third of the story, for instance, Georgy’s father’s rich employer James Leamington (James Mason) – a childless businessman who insists he always looked upon her as a daughter while she was growing up in his house – suggests they enter a written contract whereby she becomes his mistress (this while his wife Ellen, played by Rachel Kempson, is dying). Oddly, despite balking at this generous offer to effectively be his whore, by the movie’s conclusion she has ended up marrying the man – an act which allows her, in the words of The Seekers at least, to become “a new Georgy girl”.
Meanwhile, Georgy’s in-residence butler dad Ted (Bill Owen) more or less pimps her off to his boss (admittedly this is only suggested in a brief exchange of dialogue; nevertheless the implication is there), reaffirming his and his wife Doris’ (Clare Kelly) fear that their lone offspring is an awkward loser whose only real hope in life is to attach herself to some well-to-do gent.
And, before she eventually ties the knot with Leamington, the hitherto virginal heroine has an affair with Jos Jones (Alan Bates), who has just married her roommate/best friend Meredith (Charlotte Rampling) after the latter becomes pregnant.
To complicate matters, following the baby’s arrival a bitterly post-natal Meredith – who has already aborted previous pregnancies with Jones – decides she will adopt the infant out, at which point Georgy steps in as the surrogate mother. In effect this not only allows her to strengthen her connection with the soon-to-be divorced father, but also forces her to lie to the UK Government’s social services agency in order to keep her “daughter” Sara (actor unknown).
But when her happy-go-lucky lover irresponsibly throws caution to the wind by quitting his stifling job at the bank, Georgy has to reassess everything and, it’s at this point, she decides the lecherous old Leamington (who’s actually only 49) is the better option. Unfortunately, this development looks like it too may eventually be fraught with difficulty when – just as the newly-weds are being driven away from the church ceremony – her husband’s face seriously drops as it dawns on him that he hasn’t just secured a new (and much younger) squeeze who he has known since she was a baby, but will now have to compete with someone else’s child for his bride’s affections.
Thus, how their life of marital bliss will pan out becomes one of the story’s big unknowns as it’s here that the end credits roll. If anything, it is likely much of the above-mentioned unsavouriness dogging Georgy’s existence will continue as she embarks on what is in no way a certain future.
Mixed message
While this might sound like a grimly sanctimonious interpretation of a movie which, in many ways, tries to pass itself off as a melodramatic comedy, the conclusion is still inescapable – the ugly duckling heroine may have become something of a swan, but she ultimately looks set to remain stranded in the same stagnant pond. Or, to put it bluntly (and contrary to what the plot might otherwise be suggesting), it’s highly unlikely there will ever be a completely satisfactory existence for this woman.
In her above-mentioned essay on the film, which is included in the promotional material accompanying Powerhouse Films Ltd’s Blu-ray release of Georgy Girl, Weston acknowledges it does not treat its leading character “with warmth or hold her in such high regard” as audiences of the day did. Rather, “she is side-lined in her own story”; an interesting observation given Redgrave, in real life (and, one might add, quite unfairly) received third billing behind Mason and Bates.
“From today’s vantage point, Georgy just seems like an ordinary girl: vivacious, flawed, yet lovable – someone we could be friends with,” the critic says. “And that’s what makes the film so interesting.”
Perhaps. However, it’s also arguable that much of the movie’s intrigue stems from the fact its outlook is decidedly brutal. No one in the film, for instance, seems to have a particularly strong moral compass. Furthermore, at the end of its cinematic day, Swinging London is portrayed as a dead end; a place where wanton hedonism may be commonplace, but the privileged class still gets what it wants so long as it’s willing to pay the price. Thus, as a commentary about what was then the emerging youth culture’s attempt to distance itself from a stuffier (read older) generation, Georgy Girl actually turns out to be quite pessimistic.
This begs the question: is this what the film makers – particularly screenwriters Margaret Forster (who wrote the novel on which the movie is based) and Peter Nichols – set out to do?
Possibly, but it is quite difficult to ascertain as the quirky and upbeat feel of the whole narrative doesn’t seem to have an overtly ironic (or tragic) bone in its bubbly celluloid body.
Interestingly, Redgrave more or less agreed that the film’s portrayal of her character was not exactly positive when being interviewed by journalist Howard Maxford back in 1996.
“George (sic) is quite ruthless really,” she said. “So it is an immoral story, but George was such a survivor that people identified with her.”
Survival, though, comes at a cost – something, it seems, which may have been lost on progressive audiences of the day. As for contemporary viewers who embrace the values of the Me Too movement, they no doubt will find very few redeeming values in this ultimately sexist tale.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Leanne Weston: “Good Girl, Bad Luck: Morality and Performance in Georgy Girl”, Powerhouse Films Ltd promotional booklet, 2018, pp 5-13
Howard Maxford: “Making Georgy Girl”, Powerhouse Films Ltd promotional booklet, 2018, p 28
