A road less travelled

When an old flame (Manx Danny Dyer) shows up unexpectedly, Zoë (Nathalie Press), a young mother on a less than salubrious housing estate can’t find a suitable babysitter. She decides to take her chances and leaves her offspring outside the pub with crisps while she dances the night away.

Other women warn her that social services will take her brood away, that anything might happen. Sure enough, the wasp seen hovering ominously earlier that day reappears and crawls inside her baby’s mouth.
Apparently things don’t end as badly as they might, but yours truly was hiding behind the couch long before the credits rolled on Wasp, the unbearably tense Academy Award winning short film from writer-director Andrea Arnold.
Her first feature makes for similarly fraught viewing. Red Road, a gritty, intense drama set on the rundown Glaswegian estate of the same name, follows Jackie (Kate Dickie), a widowed security firm operator, paid to watch that city’s labyrinth of surveillance cameras. Utterly repressed and drifting through a life of loveless sex, it becomes clear that Jackie is as disengaged from her own existence as from the grainy mini-dramas played out on her monitors. That changes when she spies Clyde (Tony Curran), a recently released prisoner, whose crime, it soon transpires, links him with Jackie’s dreadful secret past.
Disturbing, raw and gripping, it’s difficult to link Red Road with Ms. Arnold when I meet with her at the Cork Film Festival. Rather than the dour miserabilist one might reasonably expect, the film’s author is quite literally jumping up and down as her pint of Guinness arrives at our table.
“I know it’s early”, she giggles. “Bit I’m in Ireland. I have to have Guinness, don’t I?”
This is more like the Andrea Arnold I know, the one who played Dawn on Tiswas successor No. 73 when I was a kid. I wonder how the same person can be involved with such disparate projects.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t really think about the stories in my films. They just, sort of, are what they are. But really, it’s not that different from No. 73. We had to improvise two hours of telly every Saturday morning. They might seem different but they’re coming from the same place in a way.”
Frank and not remotely given to pretension, the 42-year-old working class girl turned auteur seems genuinely bewildered by film journalists and their attempts to analyse her work.
“I met this journalist the other day,” she sighs. “He was talking about themes and hidden meanings in the film and I honestly couldn’t help him out. I never think that way when I’m writing. I just see the story play out in my head and write it down.”
Without giving too much away, Red Road’s beleaguered heroine orchestrates a twisted plan that for most people, may seem like the work of a certifiable lunatic. Are we supposed to view her thinking as distempered?
“I don’t think it’s that black and white,” says Andrea. “I think she’s working things out. Lots of people say it’s a revenge movie but I never thought of it like that. I think it’s far more complicated. People do all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons.”
Though set against a grey, graffiti-scrawled and litter-strewn background, the director is adamant that the film is not intended to be grim or forbidding or any of those other adjectives that tend to pop up in connection with British cinema.
“It’s not grim,” she states firmly. “People keep saying this, but I don’t see it that way. There’s beauty and ugliness in anything you want to look at or in any situation. Journalists keep asking me about the scene where the dog eats his food off the floor. I don’t see anything grim about that. The dog’s getting fed isn’t he? He doesn’t care if the food is in a china bowl with roses around the side. If he’s fed, he’s happy. Lots of people do that. If the dog is being looked after, what’s the problem?”
Red Road is the first film to emerge from under the Advance Party remit, the new aesthetic manifesto from Lars von Trier. The project specifies that each filmmaker, including Andrea, must use nine identical characters in three different films. The other two feature films, developed within the same structure, will be a romantic comedy and “a rather dark film.”
“There are two more directors involved,” she explains. “We worked out things about the characters in advance and had to stick to what we decided. With Jackie, there were small details I didn’t use. You used to hang-glide for example. But I stuck with the main points, that she had had something terrible happen to her in the past.”
She may be pointedly down-to-earth, but there aren’t too many women on the planet who can go home of an evening to gaze at the Oscar and Jury Prize from Cannes they’ve won for directing. With little fanfare to date, Andrea is the sneaky exception.
“I was never a big film person,” she says. “People are always asking me if I’ve seen a lot of Ken Loach and films like that and honestly, I haven’t. But I did grow up watching the Oscars. Then suddenly, you’re there getting an award and it’s really weird. I thought I was in a David Lynch film or something.”