Why isn't this a British film?

[DB7]

Why isn't this a British film?



Children of Men, Live Flesh and now Le Serpent - we need to stop letting foreign film-makers snaffle all our best stories, says John Patterson



Friday September 7, 2007

The Guardian



A nifty, nasty low-budget thriller as sharp and gripping as Le Serpent should by rights be a cause for celebration in British cinema. Based on a long-unavailable thriller by the late, and not nearly lamented enough, Ted Lewis - author of Jack's Return Home, the novel on which Mike Hodges' Get Carter was based - and featuring a murderous duel of wits between a sociopathic blackmailer and his erstwhile schoolyard tormentor, it takes us to places where British cinema all too rarely ventures. Terse, brutish, self-contained and enormously satisfying: these are adjectives I rarely get to use about a new British movie. It would be nice to use them about Le Serpent. And why can't I? Because it's a French film, that's why.



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Without getting too culturally nationalistic about it, why is Le Serpent not a British movie? Why did it take a foreigner to discern a superb film property within an out-of-print novel written three decades ago in another language? I only ask because it happens a lot. As foreign film-makers merrily plunder the nooks and crannies of our culture, nosing around like truffle dogs for the suitably scented kernel of an idea, we - the British - seem almost resolutely clueless about the riches strewn all around us.



One gets the same feeling about a movie such as Claude Chabrol's 1995 chiller La Cérémonie, Pedro Almodóvar's Live Flesh, or Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men. The first two are adapted from novels by Ruth Rendell, the latter from PD James's futuristic thriller. Each director has been smart enough to see that the most interesting novels by these two grandes dames of the British murder are not the ones featuring their authors' boring detective characters Wexford and Dalgliesh - the stories that have the most to offer a Christie/ Sayers-raised British TV whodunnit audience - but their one-off, stand-alone thrillers. (Note to Wardour Street: someone should film James's Innocent Blood before the Albanians beat us it.) Chabrol was able to adapt A Judgment in Stone to the habits and morals of the provincial French bourgeoisie, his great subject and target, without draining the novel of its power, and Almodóvar pulled off a similar feat. As for Cuarón, he not only managed the impossible by making PD James feel unimaginably kinetic and exciting rather than leadenly cerebral and mandarinesque, he also made the film very much in the action-docudrama style of Peter Watkins - another great British talent who can't get his phone calls returned in his own country.



And it doesn't end there. Only a fortnight ago British audiences were favoured with a French version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, the third version made in that country: no British version has ever been filmed, and I'll thank Ken Russell not to plug the gap. Chilean-born director Alejandro Amenábarventured into British realms when he rethought Jack Clayton's 1961 movie The Innocents in his 2001 film The Others. When talking of Pan's Labyrinth, writer-director Guillermo del Toro often named the great English children's' book illustrator Arthur Rackham as one of his foremost visual inspirations - an influence detectable in almost every frame of the film's more fantastic sequences. Roman Polanski, that honorary Great Briton, gets to make Oliver Twist better than anyone else. And if Bill Douglas were still alive, he'd be within his rights to curse Lars von Trier for borrowing the aesthetic starkness of Douglas's autobiographical trilogy for Breaking the Waves. Does anyone in this country even remember Bill Douglas, Scotland's greatest director? Apparently not: the trilogy - My Childhood, My Ain Folk, Ny Way Home - is not even on DVD.



Then there is Steven Soderbergh's The Limey, which has more to say about the relationship between London and Los Angeles, Wardour Street and Beverly Hills, and that between the 60s and the 90s, than any movie ever conceived in Britain. It's virtually a dissertation on Point Blank, Get Carter and the classic British gangster movie, yet it was written by Lem Dobbs, the largely London-raised son of American-born expatriate RB Kitaj. Why do Soderbergh and Martin Scorsese seem to know more about British cinema history and our obscure movies than anyone actually born here? And to add insult to injury, Soderbergh's Traffic was great British TV before it was ever an Oscar-winning movie.



And why is it Tim Burton of Burbank, California, and not someone born in Shoreditch or Salisbury, who gets to make the big-budget version of a classic Hammer horror movie with his Sleepy Hollow? Could we not have somehow managed this ourselves?



When the British cinema goes looking for material to adapt, it still shops in all the old familiar places. First stop, the literary top shelf. We need another version of Nicholas Nickleby because four Sunday-afternoon BBC adaptations and a decade-long theatrical version weren't enough? Ditto Vanity Fair? Frankly I'd sooner see Alfonso Cuarón's Great Expectations or Aki Kaurismaki's Hamlet goes Business than endure another Kenneth Branagh adaptation of Shakespeare. Would that the financiers agreed with me, but no.



Second stop, whatever meretricious middlebrow novelist, chick-litter or grubby regional realist is currently wowing them at WH Smith's. No, go on, please - I need that third Bridget Jones movie, or another crap Irvine Welsh film.



Our untouchably splendid literary and theatrical heritage has long been the bane of our native cinema. Cinema has always been a redheaded stepchild among the arts in Britain; not worthy of comparison to the Great Tradition, or to the glories of Thespia (which most cinemagoers, if they ever think about it, see as a dead, irrelevant art). But as long as a solid, respectable literary property is the basis for the script, then everything feels that much safer and more predictable for the backers. Unfortunately, the results often feel just as safe and predictable.



The other end of the spectrum is the Gone-Hollywood Tendency: that is to say, the mindless and infuriating urge among British film-makers to imitate or pay homage to the American thriller or action-movie genres, but without having a clue how to make such films in a British context. They show up in the US on occasion, such movies, and they vanish quickly, proving that we cannot beat them on their own turf. So why bother?



Why does it often seem that only foreigners can see British cinema clearly and levelly, and can find aspects and elements of our culture that we ourselves fail to notice? I can say from experience that I know more about British literature, culture and history now that I've lived two decades away from Britain than I ever did when I was growing up there. And I've gone from believing Americans to be the most insular people in the world to wondering if the same word isn't in fact more applicable to Our Island Race, or at least the cinematic avatars thereof. I wonder if an outside perspective is the essential ingredient in making a decent British movie. After all, our greatest native film-makers are either outcasts at home or exiles abroad, or they are foreigners living and working in Britain.



Look at the evidence. The identity of British cinema was forged in the 30s and 40s by Alexander Korda and Emeric Pressburger, two Hungarians, and by Michael Balcon, who was English but whose Jewishness lent him the slightly displaced, innovative, off-centre perspective that gave us the Ealing comedies (plus he gave Hitchcock the wherewithal to become Hitchcock). Alberto Cavalcanti brought his Brazilian version of surrealism to our shores in the 1940s, and his Went the Day Well? is both inimitably English and deeply subversive. The 1960s in Britain almost completely belong to foreigners - and, as importantly, to foreign money from the Hollywood studios. Kubrick, Polanski, Dick Lester and Joseph Losey all came to Britain and all of them saw us more clearly than we saw ourselves, taking apart our native genres, deparochialising them, injecting them with horror, humour, Marxism and mayhem. Not a single British director of the period - possibly excepting Lindsay Anderson - made films with the same degree of authority and innovation as these settlers.



And they all found surprising and challenging - and British - material to adapt that might never have caught the myopic eye of the natives. Kubrick went for early Anthony Burgess and second-rank Thackeray (lesson one: avoid the top-shelf classics). Losey's partnership with Harold Pinter exhumed odd, misshapen novels such as Robin Maugham's The Servant and Nicholas Mosley's Accident, and bent them to their own purposes to magnificent effect.



So perhaps another generation could now stand up, look around, forswear Shakespeare and Austen, and adapt some of the splendid material that's cheaply available here at home. For starters, we could do with another venal Ted Lewis adaptation, if only to keep up with the French. Then someone might start filming the odd Iain Banks novel, or David Peace's Red Riding Quartet. Do you think Hollywood would have let an American property as vivid and violent as that sit on the shelf for a decade? No, because they are serious about their cinema in a way that we simply are not. Time for a change.

[Steve Crook]

name='DB7']Why isn't this a British film?



Children of Men, Live Flesh and now Le Serpent - we need to stop letting foreign film-makers snaffle all our best stories, says John Patterson

I saw that (triggered by the mention of Emeric Pressburger)

I was wondering if we could respond with a few good examples of British films that were made from French (or other non-British) books



Steve

[DB7]

Think you might struggle for 'good' examples.

[Hugo]

How about The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (1952) from the Simenon novel,

Anna Karenina (1948) Vivian Leigh version from Tolstoy and The Queen of Spades from Pushkin. Difficult to think of more recent examples though.

[Steve Crook]

name='DB7']Think you might struggle for 'good' examples.

I was struggling. That's why I asked the experts here



Steve

[christoph404]

"Onegin" is about all that springs to mind and that was a few years ago 1999 I think, based on writings of Alexander Pushkin . St Petersburg and Russian country side was all recreated in the UK as well. I think to come up with a few more titles something along the lines of those types of period costume dramas may yield a few but certainly can't think of anything contemporary.

[batman]

Apart from the ones mentioned ... all the adaptations of non-English novels I can think of were done for TV ... Dostoevsky, Zola, Simenon and Twain.



For the more 'artistic' viewer, I suppose we have to include films based on the works of the Marquis de Sade!



Bats.

[TimR]

"The Red Shoes", "Tales of Hoffman", "The Innocents" and"Waltz of the Toreadors" are the only ones I can think of.

[Steve Crook]

name='TimR']"The Red Shoes", "Tales of Hoffman", "The Innocents" and"Waltz of the Toreadors" are the only ones I can think of.

The Red Shoes isn't really an adaptation of the fairy story, it just loosely references it. The Tales of Hoffmann and the others are a good call though



Steve

[DB7]

Henry James was an Anglophile and TotS is set in England.

[TimR]

name='Steve Crook']The Red Shoes isn't really an adaptation of the fairy story, it just loosely references it. The Tales of Hoffmann and the others are a good call though



Steve

Yes, I suppose "The Red Shoes" is stretching it a bit...

[TimR]

name='DB7']Henry James was an Anglophile and TotS is set in England.

True, Henry James would like to have been English but an accident of birth made that impossible - so he was the next best thing...

[D Cairns]

This may be one of the unfortunate things about current British cinema, we don't look far enough afield for good stories. I suppose Michael Winterbottom has made a couple of onternational type stories that are still British productions (part of his quest to try a bit of everything, I guess) but I can't think of any recent adaptations of non-English literature or other media.

[penfold]

I thought it a bit odd that the writer was quoting as examples of British writing plundered by filmmakers abroad such British works as Henry James' Turn of The Screw (for the Innocents) and Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

And as for the end comment, that Hollywood is serious about cinema...sorry, that's simply laughable.

Why do films have to be adaptations?? He complains that British filmmakers don't sniff out promising properties, and invokes, of all people, Emeric Pressburger whose best work was 100% original writing, and struggled more for inspiration when adapting ...no-one would argue for Gone to Earth, Battle of The River Plate or Ill Met By Moonlight to be the equal of the wartime films, only The Small Back Room really hitting the bulls-eye....and if you read the novel, Emeric really didn't have to do much....it's no coincidence Nigel Balchin turned to screenwriting later...his novel practically reads as a script.

The writer doesn't seem to realise that cinema is an artform that can be original in concept, and that the best cinema generally is original, not a visualised book or a stage-freed play.

[Steve Crook]

name='penfold']I thought it a bit odd that the writer was quoting as examples of British writing plundered by filmmakers abroad such British works as Henry James' Turn of The Screw (for the Innocents) and Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

And as for the end comment, that Hollywood is serious about cinema...sorry, that's simply laughable.

Why do films have to be adaptations?? He complains that British filmmakers don't sniff out promising properties, and invokes, of all people, Emeric Pressburger whose best work was 100% original writing, and struggled more for inspiration when adapting ...no-one would argue for Gone to Earth, Battle of The River Plate or Ill Met By Moonlight to be the equal of the wartime films, only The Small Back Room really hitting the bulls-eye....and if you read the novel, Emeric really didn't have to do much....it's no coincidence Nigel Balchin turned to screenwriting later...his novel practically reads as a script.

The writer doesn't seem to realise that cinema is an artform that can be original in concept, and that the best cinema generally is original, not a visualised book or a stage-freed play.

The Small Back Room surprised me when I read the novel. Surprised me quite pleasantly. I had always thought that some of the sparse dialogue in the film was typical Emeric. He always believed the story was much more important than mere spoken words. And the classic example (I thought) of Emeric's finest sparse dialogue was Sammy & Susan on the Embankment:

Susan: Where were you going Sammy?

Sammy: I don't know.

Susan: A woman?

Sammy: Maybe.

Susan: How about me?

But that's taken exactly from the book, as are many other parts that I thought were "pure Emeric"



Steve

[Mr Dean]

name='D Cairns']This may be one of the unfortunate things about current British cinema, we don't look far enough afield for good stories. I suppose Michael Winterbottom has made a couple of onternational type stories that are still British productions (part of his quest to try a bit of everything, I guess) but I can't think of any recent adaptations of non-English literature or other media.

Andrea Arnold's Red Road, for me the best British film of last year, is part of a proposed trio of films based on an idea from Lars von Trier and written with Lone Scherfig (who has made her own Scotland set film) from Zentropa. There are now many European co-productions in the UK.