Darkly funny portrait of bleak Britain
Ray & Liz 15 cert, 108 min ★★★★☆
Dir Richard Billingham Starring Ella Smith, Justin Salinger, Tony Way, Sam Gittins, Richard Ashton, Patrick Romer, Deirdre Kelly
In a quiet corner of Charles Saatchi’s 1997 Sensation show was a collection of snapshots from another world. Taken by the photographer Richard Billingham, they documented the goings-on in his parents’ putrefying West Midlands tenement flat. Raymond, Billingham’s father, was a wizened alcoholic, shown slumped by the lavatory pan, or hurling a cat across the living room. Elizabeth, Billingham’s mother, was a vast, floral-patterned chain-smoker 20 years her husband’s junior, often recumbent on the sofa with a TV dinner or jigsaw puzzle on her lap. By turns sweet, grotesque and bleakly comic, the pictures showed a country whose postwar promise had congealed like old porridge, where life had become a shabby parody of British resilience and pluck.
Billingham’s work, a vision of a Britain haunted by itself, got into the cultural bloodstream. Comedy was particularly quick to embrace it, in series such as The Royle Family, Little Britain and The League of Gentlemen, and online, the fuzzy horror-satire of Scarfolk, with its spoof public information posters warning that “Children can and will bite”.
So in a sense, Billingham’s directorial debut brings things full circle. This autobiographical period piece is often darkly funny, though describing it as comedy wouldn’t feel quite right. And while its kitchen-sink setting is familiar from British social-realist dramas past, it’s far too ambiguous to read like a hand-wringing political tract. At points it is also tinglingly eerie as it recounts a handful of loosely connected episodes from its director’s childhood.
Billingham is working with the outstanding cinematographer Daniel Landin, much celebrated for his work on Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, who sends a mythological shiver coursing through the chaos and clutter.
Ray and Liz are wonderfully played by Justin Salinger and Ella Smith in young adulthood and Patrick Romer and Deidre Kelly – better known as Benefits Street’s White Dee – in late middle age. In the later period, Ray lives alone, subsisting on murky home brew delivered by a neighbour, Sid (Richard Ashton). Liz visits, briefly, to ask for money. Flies tiptoe over the walls and bedsheets, but are set loose through the window rather than swatted. (“Everything’s got to live,” Sid observes. “Except the blacks of course.”) From here, the focus shifts to two extended flashbacks. In the first, Ray’s mentally disabled brother Saft Lol (Tony Way) is tormented by the family’s conniving lodger (Sam Gittins). The second follows Billingham’s then-nineyear-old brother Jason (Joshua Millard-lloyd), who wanders lonesomely through the local zoo, and ends up sleeping rough through neglect.
These tales are less notable for their dramatic shape than for Billingham’s magpie’s eye for telling details within them. As in the original photographs, Liz is a fearsome figure, but she is also the point around which the entire household orbits – and her absence from much of the later, framing storyline only makes the heat death of this little potted universe all the more tragic and stark. For all its startling frankness, Ray & Liz is an encounter with the spirits of a Britain that was never meant to exist.
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