Film

Rip It Up, Issue 111, 1 October 1986, Page 34

Film

WETHERBY Director: David Hare

There’s a strong element of the paradoxical in Wetherby, a film which manages to give us an intensely bleak yet emotionally charged picture of England and the English through the eyes of playwright David Hare. This paradox is seen mainly in the balance of the political and personal which, as in Hare’s Plenty (recently filmed by Australian director Fred Schepsi), is at the core of the movie.

On the political level it’s difficult to ignore the crucial issue of Britain’s involvement in South East Asia which hangs over the flashback sequences in Wetherby, paralleling as they do the colonial dilemma of Mother England satirised so gleefully in the later scenes of Plenty. More central in the later film are the personal issues, based around an emotional repression that many see as peculiarly English — what Hare describes as “how hard it is for the English to say anything or to get anything out.” This is reflected in most of the relationships from Judi Dench’s and lan Holm’s bickering couple to the hesitant and suppressed moments between Vanessa Redgrave’s bitter school-teacher and the mysterious young man who turns up on her doorstep uninvited one night, joins in a dinner party, and shoots himself in her kitchen the next morning. As a director, Hare is much less intrusive than Schepsi was with Plenty: he avoids the picturesque and instead dissects his characters in unsparing detail. The players are subjected to probing closeups, revealing a gallery of superlative performances. Redgrave is magnificent in one of the finest roles of her career.

Hare is a fiercely political playwright (his credits include the magnificent A Map of the World, a play which takes as its subject the "opposition” of various political systems at a poverty conference). We might well expect some astute political commentary from his pen, even in asides. Obe of the highlights of Plenty was a viciously

funny scene in which a drunk Meryl Streep went awry at an Embassy party and proceeded to single-handedly get her diplomat husband deported to the Middle East. In Wetherby, lan Holm enlightens a dinner party with his explanation of Thatcherism ("it’s as if she’s taking some terrible revenge for some deep damage — for crimes behind the privet hedge”). Wetherby is, without a doubt, one of the most rivetting’British films of the year. William Dart

MY BEAUTIFUL LAUND R ETTE Director: Stephen Frears Pakistani writer Hanif Kureishi has written a script for My Beautiful Laundrette that shows an equally disturbing view of contemporary Britain: that of a society torn apart by violence and deeprooted racism. He doesn’t see the current social taboos as Death and Sex, but rather Money and Thinking. It’s basically a fairly harsh vision, although it comes with its own spry of humour. Kureishi takes great delight in showing the Pakistani contingent making the most of capitalistic corruption whilst the Thatcher sun is still high in the sky. Young Omar’s success in transforming a run-down South London into a gleaming, neon fantasy palace is merely carrying on a family tradition of which his irrepressible Uncle Nasser (a sly and immensely likeable performance from Saeed Jaffrey) is the unchallenged master. Much of the publicity for My Beautiful Laundrette is bound up with its presentation of a gay romance between Omar and a young ex-National Front Londoner Johnny (Daniel Day Lewis in a very different guise from his foppish Cecil Vyse in A Room With a View). However, using the immediacy of television techniques (it was originally made for Channel Four in Britain), we are also given vivid insight into a broader spectrum of British life: we can feel the rejection of Shirley-Anne Field’s discarded mistress, the tremendous sexuality and anger of Rita Wolf’s Tania and, above all, the ominous threat of Johnny’s alienated former young colleagues, whose attack on the laundromat provides the climax to the film. William Dart