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Ray and Liz
****
Dir: Richard Billingham
Starring: Justin Salinger, Ella Smith, Tony Way
(UK, 15, 1hr 48 mins)
The British kitchen-sink drama has a long and rich tradition. In something akin to its modern form it goes back to the late ‘50s/early ‘60s, with Woodfall Productions and films like Look Back in Anger, and A Taste of Honey. As the ‘60s drew to a close came the appearance of two of its most famous modern progenitors, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Of course, it goes back beyond that too – class is such a defining feature of the British psyche, more so than much of mainland Europe, that it has long been embedded in the filmmaking process here.
The notion of the kitchen-sink drama comes with its own set of expectations and visual motifs. I can sometimes feel myself sighing whenever a film with such attachments comes on my radar – poverty, abuse, peeling wallpaper – though it’s not as hard and exasperated a sigh as when it’s another Austen-esque costume drama. One of the primary issues with so many kitchen-sink dramas is their rather strict adherence to three-act structures and narrative scriptwriting ‘rules’. Their realist nature is so often subsumed in favour of character arcs and narrative structure that it breaks that realist spell. But reality is not like that. Our lives are often a jumble of day-to-day mundanities and the occasional point of interest.
That’s the secret behind the success of Ray and Liz, and what separates it from the kitchen-sink crowd. It is based on photographer-turned-director Richard Billingham’s photo book Ray’s a Laugh, in which he captured images of his alcoholic father and chain-smoking mother. The film cuts between an elderly Ray (Patrick Romer, Justin Salinger in his younger form), cooped up alone in a high-rise with only a friend’s homebrew and cigarettes for company, and an earlier life. The earlier life is not happier per se, but at least features the presence of wife Liz (Ella Smith) and two sons. Here there are various often drink-fuelled incidents; a drunk mentally-disabled neighbour, a children’s party where one of the boys isn’t picked up and ends up sleeping on the street.
There’s no real climax to these sections – it runs like a series of recollections. The film’s use of the square-style academy ratio (so underutilised these days – down with widescreen!) and its visual style – a focus on inserts of objects, often ones associated with childhood memories and a sense of photographic stillness to much of it – recalls faded memories rather than the influence of outside storytellers imposing structure on top. The most obvious reference is Terence Davies’ majestic masterpiece Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), also a film that evaded obvious narrative structures.
In the hands of a director less convinced of his convictions, Ray and Liz might have gone for third-act melodrama. As it is, the climax of the film, though sad in its own way, is deftly underplayed. What emerges from the film is not an image of poverty as an excoriating tragedy as so often depicted, but a fact of life for many people. And when you grow up in that poverty, much of it isn’t so dramatic. That’s not to say to say that parental neglect or child hunger should be ignored, but cathartic hand-wringing is not a solution, just a reaction. Ray and Liz leaves the audience without an obvious sense of closure, a challenge to our narrative prejudices as viewers. It’s not a ‘poverty porn’ film that gawps at tragedy, nor is it well-meaning piety, but rather an account, a recollection, a fact. And that simplicity makes it all the more powerful.
words Fedor Tot
Ray and Liz is out in cinemas now and is currently playing in Chapter until Thu 14 Mar. Tickets here