This week sees the beginning of a dark and ambitious trilogy on C4. Red Riding promises to be gritty and basically 'orrible; I forget who coined the term 'Yorkshire noir', but it sounds pretty grim.
Reviews have so far made the “it's grim up north” joke to the point of overkill, so let's hope the next two films will allow reviewers to move on to other things.
1974 certainly sets a pretty grim – though I prefer 'bleak' – tone for the series which is based on a quartet of books by David Peace (what a surname for someone writing this pitch-black stuff!). It's all about the dealings of West Yorkshire Police and the Yorkshire Post – using fictional characters mostly, though apparently the higher-ranking police are based on real people. The fact that it's West Yorkshire Police makes me worry that my life is becoming dominated by that place, as my last blog post was about West Yorkshire Playhouse. Thankfully, Othello was a rather more pleasant experience...and it's not often you get to say that.
Being set in 1974, and having young men floating about being policemen and journalists, this was bound to feel a bit like Life on Mars. In parts, it does, though I gather director Julian Jarrold tried to avoid that.
"We went for a colour we all associate with the Seventies, which is slightly brownish and muted. What I didn't want to do was to go down the Life on Mars route and plaster it with pop songs of the periods."he says in The Independent. Really? Well, full marks on the brownish tint conjuring a seventies feel, but if you wanted to avoid 'the Life on Mars route', maybe you shouldn't have given your central character a leather jacket almost identical to Sam Tyler's... Also, what is it about the muted brown stuff that make us think of the seventies? Surely, colour existed back then in much the same way it does now? But then, the trailer for next week's film (set in 1980) has an entirely different colour quality to it – much brighter, with more contrast between black and white.
That Independent article is also one that mentions the 'Jacobean' ending...and Jacobean it certainly is – brilliantly so.
Fresh from failure on Fleet Street – though not exactly fresh-faced – Yorkshire Post reporter Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) is investigating the disappearance and later murder of a little girl who never made it home from school. During his highly professional investigation, he somehow gets his end away three times in the space of roughly half an hour – with two different women. One of them – Paula Garland (Rebecca Hall) – is the mother of a missing girl, and turns out to be real trouble for the poor lad.
Dunford soon regrets laughing at his mate's fears about the Police 'death squads'. Barry (Anthony Flanagan) is obviously just being paranoid...until a sheet of glass flies from a lorry and slices his head off. Hmm, suspicious. It seems these Policemen really are as nasty as Barry thought. In fact, West Yorkshire Police come out of this pretty badly. They're corrupt and violent, and possibly a tad inept.
If you didn't already have a bleak impression of West Yorkshire, you probably will after Red Riding, which may be the intention, but I'm not convinced. From the bigotry of Sean Bean's brutal businessman to the general grubbiness of the council estates, it's not exactly pro-Yorkshire...unless you happen think this is quintessential Yorkshire. It isn't. Then there's the all-too-familiar black bag over the head of a man held prisoner by men in uniform. Okay, he's not a Jihadist held by US military forces in Abu Ghraib, no. He's a British reporter held by West Yorkshire Police in an underground cell near the moorland they chuck him into from the back of a lorry. So that's better, then.
It's not looking good for justice in the rest of the series.
Such a nice post to share.
ReplyDelete