DIRTY WEEKEND

DIRTY WEEKEND (Directed by Michael Winner. Starring Lia Williams, David McCallum, Rufus Sewell, Sylvia Syms and Ian Richardson)

You might feel like having a bath after Dirty Weekend, a film where the deliberately repugnant content is almost completely overpowered by its sheer aesthetic offensiveness. There's brutal murder and perverse sex, but the blood and semen are less likely to turn your stomach than the awful wallpaper. Or the ham acting. The inept camerawork. The flat lighting. The incompetent editing. The clumsy dubbing. The heavy handed soundtrack. The sheer cack-handed amateurishness of the whole mishandled mess.

Built like one of the half-smoked cigars that always seem to poke from his mouth, Michael Winner looks every square inch the successful film director. And indeed is. Responsible for thirty films in thirty years, he's a virtual one man British film industry. He has worked with such notable actors as Orson Welles, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, Charles Bronson, Michael Caine and Jeremy Irons. Marlon Brando said, of all the directors he had worked with, Michael Winner was his favourite. Heady praise! But then he qualified that by explaining that their relationship during the filming of the turgid gothic melodrama The Nightcomers had been based on the agreement that since Brando was a great actor and Winner was not a great director, Brando could do whatever the hell he wanted.

And it's true, Winner is not a great director. This is the man who brought you Play It Cool, Some Like It Cool and the Cool Mikado (all deeply uncool); I'll Never Forget Whatsisname (long forgotten); The Big Sleep (the sleepy version); A Chorus Of Disapproval (it came from the reviews) and, the movies that made him so bankable, Death Wish, Death Wish II and Death Wish 3 (he couldn't even keep the numbering system consistent).

In fact, he's an awful director. By common critical consent, he's the least talented film-maker working in cinema today. The baffling thing is that he's working at all. But you have to hand it to the guy. Just when you think he's hit an all-time low (last year's deeply unfunny comedy, Bullseye) he manages to raise the finance, roll the cameras and sink a little lower.

Dirty Weekend finds him wallowing about at the bottom of a particularly unpleasant barrel. Based on a poetic novel of pure feminist bile, in which a victimised woman takes violent vengeance on repressive men, this is a potentially brave, invigorating, shocking and controversial black comedy. Some of that potential lingers on in the script, which turns unusual corners and employs large tracts of the novel's wittily acerbic dialogue.

A pervert (Rufus Sewell), intimidating the heroine, Bella (Lia Williams), describes a vicious multiple rape that concluded with one man pissing in the victim's face. "Now fair's fair," this extremely odious man suddenly declares, "I'm no prude, but that's what I call out of order." Dirty Weekend skirts to the edge of bad taste then presses on regardless, courting outrageousness in the manner of Man Bites Dog and Reservoir Dogs. But the difference is this film is a genuine dog.

The sets look like they were dressed by a cowboy interior designer with a few tins of cream coloured paint left over from a job painting the corridors on a tenement building. Set in the seaside sleaze of Brighton, Winner chooses not to exaggerate or accentuate the peculiarly British picture postcard kitsch but simply shoot it flat, giving it the visual allure of a bad daytime soap.

A hotel room sexual encounter between an extremely obese man and Bella, decked out in tacky underwear, looks like an animated snapshot from a Reader's Wives page in a cheap porn mag. If this was the intention it might be laudable, yet it doesn't have the extra edge of exaggeration you would find in a deliberate visual parody. It simply reeks of the unprofessionalism that pervades the photography of all those anonymous husbands.

It is in this scene that one begins to suspect where the material's appeal lay for the enormously sexist Winner. The core of the film may be violently feminist but he can't help lingering lecherously on the lingerie. A semi-naked girl with a gun: that's Michael Winner territory. And if he has to include some anti-male ranting to justify the sex and death, well so be it. He's a maestro of suffering, but he's no suffragette.

In her first starring role, Lia Williams brings an off-beat wit to her performance as the sheep turned slaughterer. A relative newcomer to movies, she can be forgiven for submitting herself to Winner's direction. What some of the actors are doing here, however, is frankly baffling. Do the likes of Ian Richardson and David McCallum really need the work?

McCallum gets to drive a jag and wear the kind of bachelor stud clothes he swanned around in during the Sixties, but now approaching his own sixties the Man From Uncle makes a truly embarrassing show of himself as the kind of man who wants little girls to call him uncle. Richardson puts in a risible cameo as a Persian mystic, his short scene not helped by the fact that the voice-over announces it takes place at night, while the director has chosen to shoot it by day.

Sylvia Syms pops up equally briefly as an insidiously insulting employer, but she has to contend with a bad attack of shifting perspective. In a straightforward two way conversation, Winner bizarrely changes angle and distance every time he cuts from one head to the other. The effect is disorientating, but not for the reasons the director perhaps intended. It is such a purposeless transgression of basic film rules it only serves to draw attention to the uncertain hand behind the camera.

If this was a first time film (which is what it looks like) by some ambitious amateur, you might single the director out as a talent to watch for the sheer perversity of the storyline and the general air of lunatic exaggeration. But as the thirtieth movie of an established film-maker, you can only observe with an air of gawping amazement and wonder when he is going to give up and start doing something he has an aptitude for.

Done in the worst possible taste, the bad taste Dirty Weekend leaves in your mouth has less to do with content than with context. Winner's latest is another real loser.