The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Gripping portraits of exploitation and risk
DARK RIVER & AMERICAN HONEY
Tuesday, Film 4, 11pm, and Tuesday, Film 4, 12.45am
AHEAD of International Women’s Day on March 8, Film 4 wheels out a double bill of works by two of the UK’s stellar female directors, Clio Barnard and Andrea Arnold, whose 2006 debut Red Road was filmed in Glasgow and went on to win her the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
A decade on she crossed the Pond to make American Honey, a road movie starring Sasha Lane, Shia LeBeouf and Riley Keough, and repeated the feat at the 2016 festival.
First, though, to 2017’s Dark River, one of a series of bleak films which arrived post-Brexit and which dealt with rural life and rural issues, though not in a way that would ever make you want to move to the countryside. Here, Ruth Wilson stars as
Alice Bell, a working sheep shearer who is dragged back to the family farm – we’re in some undefined area of the north of England – after the death of her father, Richard (Sean Bean).
Alice and Richard have been estranged for years, for reasons which become clear through flashbacks as the film proceeds, and Alice’s brother Joe is surprised to see her return after so long. He’s then enraged when he learns that she has applied to take over the tenancy of the farm. There’s no such thing as a simple domestic drama, but the forces powering this one are savage and primal.
Arnold’s American Honey was inspired by a New York Times article about so-called ‘magazine crews’, gangs of young drifters and misfits who sell magazine subscriptions door-to-door.
They’re driven from city to city by unscrupulous gang-masters who take most of their earnings, put them up in seedy motels and often inflict violence and abuse, either physical or mental.
But for 18-year-old Star
(Lane) it looks like an escape from her life as surrogate mother to the two young children of her abusive older boyfriend. After she sees the crew in a supermarket causing merry havoc, she is intrigued.
She’s also attracted by the person and the patter of Jake (LeBeouf), the boyfriend and general factotum of team leader Krystal.
He tells he where the gang is staying so she dumps her old life and joins … well not exactly the circus, but close to it.
Filmed in a free-wheeling style and constantly on the move, American Honey gives a typically unvarnished view of the recklessness of youth, seen through the prism of a young woman who wants more from life.
But for all the bonhomie of the oddball family of waifs and strays that Star joins, there’s a dark underside: American Honey is also a portrait of youth in extremis.
It’s not always a comfortable watch, but then Arnold’s films never are.
THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES
BBC iPlayer, Now streaming
ALTHOUGH it was screened earlier this month on BBC Two, it wasn’t networked in Scotland so now is your chance to catch this terrific 2012 drama from American director Derek Cianfrance.
Ryan Gosling is on typically mercurial form as Luke Glanton, aka Handsome Luke, an itinerant daredevil motorcycle rider working in a carney show in upstate New York when the film starts in the late 1990s.
But when he finds out he has fathered a child there with Romina Gutierrez (Eva Mendes), he sticks around hoping to inveigle his way into her life – which doesn’t please her new boyfriend, Kofi (Mahershala
Ali, who would go on to Oscar success in Moonlight).
Luke’s way of providing for his son is unusual: he embarks on a spree of increasingly daring bank robberies with help from lugubrious local bad boy Robin (Ben Mendelsohn).
Luke hits the bank, makes a getaway on his motorbike and rides into a trailer conveniently parked up nearby which Robin then drives back to their hideout. It all goes swimmingly until it doesn’t.
Gosling, Mendes, Ali and Mendelsohn are all dynamic presences but what lifts the film is its three-part structure and a linking section which introduces Bradley Cooper as Avery Cross, an ambitious young police officer and – when the film jumps forward a decade and a half for the final section – father of a teenage son and an aspiring local politician.
Choices in one life have echoes other lives: that’s Cianfrance’s thesis in a drama that’s as nimble and surprising as it is weighty.