One of the pleasures of the annual BFI Media Studies Conference, an event which assembles a range of speakers to present a widely varied set of talks, seminars and workshops to teachers of Media and Film, is the film screening on the last day. In the past we've had appearances from the likes of Shane Meadows and Danny Boyle (introducing his then-forthcoming Millions), and this year we were fortunate enough to have Stephen Frears appearing for a chat and Q&A prior to a screening of his latest, Tamara Drewe, an adaptation of Posy Simmonds' graphic novel.
Frears' career in many way typifies the schizophrenic nature of British filmmaking, as torn between the small production scale of movies supported by domestic television companies and the lure and broader possibilities of Hollywood. He emerged as a talented director of television films in the 1970s, having learned his craft as an assistant on Lindsay Anderson’s If…. Most of his films on the Seventies and early Eighties were made for TV, with no theatrical release involved (these included a number of adaptations of Alan Bennett plays). Frears always speaks fondly of the BBC at that time, seeing it in the context of post-war public service and the freshly egalitarian culture of the times. The moribund scale of the British film industry of this period is evident in the thirteen long years that separated his theatrical debut feature, Gumshoe (1971), and his next work to enjoy distribution in cinemas.
But Frears then became a leading figure in the rejuvenation of British cinema that was stimulated with the emergence of Film Four (a film production offshoot of Channel 4) in the mid Eighties. Up to this point, his drama for the BBC had often been feature length but was limited to 'play for today' territory and subjected to industrial agreements that prevented its cinematic exhibition. Television films by such liminaries as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh thus failed to find a wider audience. Film Four changed everything, allowing their films to be seen not only in British cinemas but also abroad if foreign distributors got involved.
In particular, Frears’ film of Hanif Kureshi’s My Beautiful Laundrette represented a breakthrough in terms of both the film industry (it was made by Film Four in partnership with a brand new company – Working Title – who would go on to make the Richard Curtis/Hugh Grant movies, Bridget Jones’ Diary and Billy Elliot) and also subject matter (the British Asian community, and a gay relationship between a white racist youth and a Pakistani). This was progressive, risk-taking filmmaking at a time when cinema admissions in the United Kingdom were plummeting. It was picked up for American distribution by Orion Classics, who were also responsible for the release of Woody Allen films at that time, and its crossover success was confirmed when it was nominated for a Best Oscar screenplay.
The continuing importance to the British film industry of television production is evident in Frears’ recent career – his later films include Mrs Henderson Presents (a BBC co-production) and The Queen (an ITV co-production). The latter’s popularity in America, culminating in an Oscar for Helen Mirren, testified to the success British films can achieve internationally when they project particular resonant images of national identity. Frears has also been, intermittently, a ‘Hollywood’ director, making such films as Dangerous Liaisons and High Fidelity; the latter was a Working Title production but the finance and distribution came from a big American studio (in this case, Disney). The film featured an American cast and transposed its record shop setting from London to Chicago.
When Frears presented a documentary on British film to mark the centenary of cinema ('Typically British', 1995), he drew on his own experience to reflect upon the position of the domestic film business and its practitioners at that moment. His commentary was, however, co-scripted by film academic Charles Barr, and when I and other delegates asked Frears at the BFI Conference if he could give his own 'postscript' fifteen years later, commenting on his continued oscillation between Hollywood-based work and more obviously British films, his rather gruff, nebulous responses added little to his earlier observations. No matter: Frears' seeming orneriness is more symptomatic of what David Thomson calls his 'charactersitic deflection of high praise' than of an inflated artistic ego. Thomson economically describes the humane skill of his work ('his love of people, his sense of humour and pain sitting side by side, his skill with actors, and his deftness as a storyteller'), and the tender precision of Dirty Pretty Things, his brilliant study of the lives of a couple of illegal immigrants in London, underlined for me Frears' superiority over his lauded compatriot, Mike Leigh.
Tamara Drewe, then, is something of a disappointment, for all that Frears adores Posy Simmond's work and found the shooting of the film to be one of his most pleasurable. The story's subversion of its Ambridge-like rural idyll ('Buff Orpington' is the name of the sleepy village in question) demands a more daring, smouldering tone than it mostly gets and which young stars Gemma Arterton and Dominic Cooper promise. Those two fledging stars are crying out for more fulfilling parts than the British cinema seems able to offer them, and here they are swamped by the bland, inconsequential tone of the material which is reminscent of, as one IMdB reviewer tautologically puts it, 'bad Woody Allen' (or Leigh's own, trite Happy-go-lucky for that matter). This is Frears in a minor key, redeemed a little by the finely judged portrayal of the unhappy couple of a long-suffering housewife - the excellent Tamsin Greig - and her philandering writer husband, played with villainous relish by Roger Allam. They hint at the richness of characterisation that can be found in abundance elsewhere in Frear's quietly substantial back catalogue, not least in his lovely version of Roddy Doyle's The Snapper, which he revealed in his conference session to be a personal favourite of President Mitterand. Even the French are able to savour English culture when it as good as Frear's filmmaking.
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