“I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.”
— Mark Twain
The clever video above dovetails nicely with Andrew O’Hehir’s insightful piece today exploring what he calls “The British indie explosion.” Though showcasing talents on opposite sides of The Chunnel, the video and article each offer evidence of Europe’s facility with telling stylish compelling stories on a frugal budget. Almost a lost art stateside, it’s the type of well-crafted modestly-budgeted movie that’s in short supply among American studio and “indie” releases alike.
Well before the 1970s explosion of rebellious American cinema that brought Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg to worldwide fame, London was the center of its own low-budget film renaissance, one that saw American expatriates like Stanley Kubrick and Joseph Losey working alongside young British upstarts like Lindsay Anderson, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Alan Clarke. (A certain Polish-French director who’s been in the news lately also worked in England in the ’60s.)
That moment isn’t widely remembered today, for a bunch of different reasons, and in the intervening years British acting and directing talent has overwhelmingly flowed toward Hollywood. Given the tepid, depressive state of American independent film right now, though, and the clear sense that things are sprouting up across the Atlantic like wildflowers after an English rainstorm, I’m betting it won’t be long before we see ambitious Yanks emulating Kubrick and Losey’s example. Urgently paging Andrew Bujalski, Antonio Campos and Azazel Jacobs: Go east, young men!
I’m not claiming that no good movies are being made in the United States; far from it. But the film industry and its marketplace seem segmented in a way that isn’t helping artists or audiences. There are a handful of brand-name Indiewood directors who can pretty much write their own ticket: Tarantino, the Coen brothers, the unrelated Andersons (Wes and P.T.). Below that we see a lot of clever, minor tweakage applied to familiar formulas: “(500) Days of Summer” or “Jennifer’s Body.” Lower still in the ecosystem, lo-fi, achingly sincere movies get made by the dozen. (Instead of supplying names and links, let’s just stipulate that that’s most of the films I’ve written about over the last five years or so.) They travel the festival circuit for a few months, and the better ones get released in theaters or via VOD, before being universally rejected by the media-saturated public’s collective immune system.
A solid analysis, rather brilliantly unpacked, with the kind of contextual relevance O’Hehir handles so well. From there, Andrew narrows his focus to three specific films that prove his point. It’s well worth a click to read the entire piece, but I can’t resist quoting a bit more after the cut.
When exciting young directors like Bujalski, Campos or Jacobs emerge, out there on the underfed indie fringes, there seems to be no way to break out of the tiny club of aficionados who attend Sundance or South by Southwest and bring their work to a smart, film-literate general audience. Maybe those filmmakers and others have self-marginalized to some degree, making highly personal, idiosyncratic works and accepting that in a downsizing economy their future lies in self-distribution, social networking, digital downloads and so on.
But look across the ocean and behold: “An Education” is both cleverly packaged and wonderfully executed; it will get terrific reviews, do decent big-city business and plausibly garner at least a best-actress nomination for the irresistible Mulligan and a supporting actor nod for Alfred Molina (who plays the wanton teen’s suburban dad). Lone Scherfig, its director, is a 50-year-old Danish woman whose only international success came with “Italian for Beginners” in 2000. A year ago, the only way Scherfig could have found work in Hollywood was as a high-priced Euronanny (or maybe an upscale Scando-dominatrix); this winter, I garr-yan-tee that Harvey Weinstein leaps from the pool and scurries to the phone when she’s on the line. (Stephanie Zacharek will provide a full review of “An Education” on Friday.)
I’m dubious that Americans will cotton to “Bronson” in large numbers; it isn’t about the other, better-known Charles Bronson, and he isn’t in it (having been dead for six years). But it provides a glorious showcase for the amped-up talents of both star Hardy and director Winding Refn, who in another era would have ridden his grueling, violent, dark-side-of-Copenhagen “Pusher” trilogy straight to Hollywood. In its portrayal of the charismatic, sociopathic skinhead hero (n√© Michael Peterson), and its delirious soundtrack blending Puccini and Wagner with the Pet Shop Boys, “Bronson” owes a little or a lot to Kubrick’s “Clockwork Orange,” but if that’s a crime I wish more people would commit it.