DELIGHT | FILM FEATURE
James Sidwell finds out about Delight – a film of love and war set in West Wales
Delight: in which a traumatised ex-war-journalist flees a broken marriage in search of an ex-lover, and finds redemption in the arms of his son. This is the basic plot of Gareth Jones’ new film, and the second instalment in his most recent project, the Desire trilogy.
I’ve got to say from the outset, it’s a pretty academic project. While I haven’t seen either the prequel Desire, or the sequel Delusion (still in production), they putatively focus around similar themes of creativity vs. libido, emotional turmoil vs. absolution, and cultural tension. That said, Jones has just finished his part time PhD from Cambridge on film and the trauma of war, so we can’t expect him to be making Fast and Furious 19.5 or whatever it is we’re on…
The film lays some claim to having strong Welsh roots as well; it was made on a farm in Wales, close to the village in which Jones himself grew up, as the director felt that the landscape had a lot of natural beauty to offer that had hitherto been sadly absent from mainstream cinema. And most of the cast are Welsh as well, with the exception of… well, all the leads actually, played by two Englishmen and a Jeanne Balibar from France, but, despite this, there’s a great sense in the film of national pride, even heightened by the sense of cultural tension we get from the feeling of intrusion upon the peaceful beauty of the Welsh countryside.
The photography is beautiful, and the way in which he uses, not just natural beauty, but also old ruins, and other instances of human intrusion on the landscape as a reflection for the character’s emotional disruption is clever, but no one could ever accuse this film of not being ‘clever’. That’s not the problem.
Quite the reverse. Considering Jones’ asserted desire to ‘break new ground without overstepping the bounds of commercially viable cinema’, I had hoped to have found one of those rare directors who doesn’t think that making his ideas accessible is somehow cheating. Instead, what I got was two hours of pretentiously unfathomable script, delivered in an alternating pattern of pouty monotone and flailing hysteria (with the notable, but all too fleeting, exceptions of Tim Dutton and Eiry Thomas, who, rather jarringly, managed to sound like real people). However, the image of sulky eyed artists trying to come to grips with personal traumas by displaying as little emotion as dramatically possible seems to have become a defining reason why most people avoid experimental theatre. It’s just a shame that a film of such obvious heart and intelligence fell into the trap.
Admittedly, this isn’t helped by the fact that much of the exposition is left until the end. Now, this is a common technique even in mainstream theatre. Stuff like Vanilla Sky and Inception give us the ‘Alice down the rabbit hole feeling’ for that deeply satisfying ‘ohh…’ of realisation as everything slots into place. Unfortunately, in this instance, it doesn’t and as a result all the great ideas in from the initial conception remain frustratingly abstract.
And they are great ideas. The question of violence and war expresses Jones’ own concerns on the subject of on-screen violence and the prevalence and presentation of war in modern cinema. Echo’s attempts to disentangle herself from her former role becomes demonstrative of this struggle for peace and vindication and, in this search, sex becomes the great redeemer, the release that drives out nightmares, but itself retains an element of perversion by its disturbingly incestuous undertones while conventional views of sexual acceptability become subjugated under the demands of creative vindication, and this provides fuel for the role of Echo as the disruptive ‘outsider’, providing a social commentary on the global vs. the parochial of the growing diaspora in a new and fundamentally cosmopolitan – *breathes* you get the idea…
For these reasons, I can see why it was nominated for the Golden St George award at the 35th Moscow International Film Festival, and was the official selection at the Cambridge Theatre Festival; the intent behind the film’s creation is intelligent, ambitious, and thought provoking.
While credit’s due for Jones’ attempt, it would appear that, cinematically, the hoped for ‘new ground’ has been ploughed and furrowed too many times already. And ‘commercially’ viable’? Wait for the lecture series. That will be worth the price of admission.
Delight, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, until Tues 25 June. Tickest: £4.20-£7.20. Info:www.chapter.org/delight