Arnold, A (2006) Red Road
The voyeur, behind a camera, at a peephole or watching intently as in ‘Rear Window’ is someone we can identify with and squirm in complicity.
We can gaze with the gazer, even if we don’t see them as in ‘Caché’.
‘Red Road’ is also a film that puts us behind the peephole: this particular time set in a roomful of CCTV monitors with security guard Jackie (Kate Dickie). She observes through the screens a man from her past and the impressive direction takes our council viewer from protective voyeurism into direct stalking.
There is not much action or dialogue throughout the beginning. The loneliness stretched taut but shown leisurely, moves into an intense middle section with steel in its soul. Becoming a potent female fantasy about a woman taking power and letting go, moving into a raw and powerful depiction of female strength and sexuality.
Set in the Red Road flats in Barmulloch in Glasgow, Scotland, the scenes could actually be representing life in many working class cities throughout the U.K. However Scottish creativity in the arts is at its peak, in allowing miserable existences through uber-realism to be portrayed so vividly, with Andrea Arnold confidently showing a taste for graphic sexuality rare in a female director. She received numerous awards for her short story ‘Wasp’ (2003), including an Academy Award, and this being doubly, her debut feature and Cannes winner is the first in a Lars Von Trier inspired ‘Dogme 95’ experimental trilogy, devised by Danish film-makers Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen as an Advance Party project. This entails three directors to embellish films with the same cast of characters and amongst various rules is the aim of keeping the budget under one £1,000.000.
This film is held together by emotionally complex performances and stark scenarios with hand-held camera work. It is both provocative and gripping and revelling in the fact of ignoring that nearly all surveyors in cinema are white middle class men.
‘Red Road’ exposes the cosy conceptual coupling of male voyeurism and surveillance leads us on board with a protagonist who is flawed and complex . The director’s use of philosophical notions of forgiveness, revenge and redemption are well integrated with a close and predatory, claustrophobic feeling of despair. There are two outstanding scenes, one at a party and the other an explicit sexual encounter shot in an erotic way with a feeling of terror.
The third-act reveals the shocking truth as to why Jackie pursues Clyde with so much resilience, focus and determination. The viewer is maybe left with the impression that the melodramatic ending did not compliment the dark, redemptive nature of a ‘Big Brother/Sister’ society explored by an innovative director determined to do it ..her way.
Review by ..Timo Francis May 2011
Having recently revisted this film I agree that the film depiction of a women enpoweed by her CCTV camera takes the plunge and faces her demons when she see's the face she never thought she would. There is absoulutely no doubt that such a great narrative backed up with amazing visual should be archived for prosperaty depicting a community we see the protectional ties viewed by the main female character played by Katie Dickie
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