Stephen Poliakoff
Posted: Tue May 18, 2010 11:34 pm
I caught a rare screening on the BBC last night of the Poliakoff written (but not directed) film from 1989, She's Been Away. While watching I thought back to the discussion on Poliakoff a little while ago in the 1990s list discussion. But rather than just talking about this film I thought it would be better to create a general thread where we can perhaps move on to talk in general about all the films written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff.
Many of the key Poliakoff themes are present: memory being more vivid than the rather drab present; faded family photographs revealing layers of meaning and hidden secrets; vaguely aristocratically pretentious and forced family gatherings set against the more anarchical black sheep of the family. She's Been Away was interesting for focusing almost entirely on the 'black sheep' character, whereas in later works such as Shooting The Past or Perfect Strangers they are often marginal, but fascinating characters (and often played by Timothy Spall!)
It involves a woman, Lillian (Peggy Ashcroft in her last role), who has been held in an asylum for 60 years being released back into the care of her family, initially leading to friction with her great-nephew's wife. There is a strange twisting of the old cliche of 'learning from each other' as the initial odd couple mental illness comedy starts to strain and turns dark as Harriet proves to be in the process of her own mental breakdown, perhaps triggered by the stress of having to care for Lillian, perhaps just something that was always going to occur due to her rather cold relationship with her husband Hugh and discovering that she is pregnant again. Eventually she goes on one of those 'inspirational road journeys' with Lillian in tow (strangely prefiguring Thelma & Louise from a couple of years later!) while abandoning her husband and young son (who she has never really acknowledged during the course of the film and who turns out to strangely be the most mature character in the piece - disturbing for his maturity beyond his years while all the adults behave like children) who believe that they have been kidnapped.
While some of this main plot is rather broadly played (Hugh is a succesful city trader type, making a rather blunt point about the empty lives of money men. Though it is funny to see the pretentious 'welcome home' party involving a game of film charades where people call out guesses of Closely Observed Trains and, cheekily, The Cow ("it's an Iranian film!") to Harriet's enthusiastic miming. When Harriet eventually manages to convey the 'grass' part of Splendor In The Grass through miming a hippie smoking weed she then gets immediately undercut by Hugh saying that she is still a good actress despite never actually having had a successful career) and Harriet becomes increasingly grating over the course of the film as she disintegrates (she does have the best line early on though, again relating to her stunted acting career: "I used to play the bitches who get killed off halfway through the first act in Agatha Christie. Typecasting don't you think?"), there are a number of moments where the film becomes quite powerful, mostly in Lillian's vivid flashbacks to her younger, boisterous self becoming overly and violently obsessed with a young man, leading to her incarceration.
Harriet's decent into dangerous insanity actually seems to help Lillian to return into the world as she finds someone to protect - leading to a sort of 'boys against girls' (also 'insane individual against powerful authority figures') feel to the final standoff in the barricaded hospital room.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect in the context of Poliakoff's later work is the early section dealing with Lillian being taken from the decomissioned mental hospital and back home, with Hugh's attempting to teach her how they relate by describing their family history. A later work like Perfect Strangers involves a character outside of the main family being introduced to all of its intricacies and relationships, however here Lillian can't retain or really understand any of that information. Her flashbacks that 'explain' why she was locked away cannot be communicated to others (unlike say Shooting The Past where every series of pictures is a story waiting to be told, or invented, for a particular purpose), just inform her own actions. Eventually uncovering the 'mystery' (as in Hidden City) becomes less important than how the process of discovery in itself affects the characters.
Many of the key Poliakoff themes are present: memory being more vivid than the rather drab present; faded family photographs revealing layers of meaning and hidden secrets; vaguely aristocratically pretentious and forced family gatherings set against the more anarchical black sheep of the family. She's Been Away was interesting for focusing almost entirely on the 'black sheep' character, whereas in later works such as Shooting The Past or Perfect Strangers they are often marginal, but fascinating characters (and often played by Timothy Spall!)
It involves a woman, Lillian (Peggy Ashcroft in her last role), who has been held in an asylum for 60 years being released back into the care of her family, initially leading to friction with her great-nephew's wife. There is a strange twisting of the old cliche of 'learning from each other' as the initial odd couple mental illness comedy starts to strain and turns dark as Harriet proves to be in the process of her own mental breakdown, perhaps triggered by the stress of having to care for Lillian, perhaps just something that was always going to occur due to her rather cold relationship with her husband Hugh and discovering that she is pregnant again. Eventually she goes on one of those 'inspirational road journeys' with Lillian in tow (strangely prefiguring Thelma & Louise from a couple of years later!) while abandoning her husband and young son (who she has never really acknowledged during the course of the film and who turns out to strangely be the most mature character in the piece - disturbing for his maturity beyond his years while all the adults behave like children) who believe that they have been kidnapped.
While some of this main plot is rather broadly played (Hugh is a succesful city trader type, making a rather blunt point about the empty lives of money men. Though it is funny to see the pretentious 'welcome home' party involving a game of film charades where people call out guesses of Closely Observed Trains and, cheekily, The Cow ("it's an Iranian film!") to Harriet's enthusiastic miming. When Harriet eventually manages to convey the 'grass' part of Splendor In The Grass through miming a hippie smoking weed she then gets immediately undercut by Hugh saying that she is still a good actress despite never actually having had a successful career) and Harriet becomes increasingly grating over the course of the film as she disintegrates (she does have the best line early on though, again relating to her stunted acting career: "I used to play the bitches who get killed off halfway through the first act in Agatha Christie. Typecasting don't you think?"), there are a number of moments where the film becomes quite powerful, mostly in Lillian's vivid flashbacks to her younger, boisterous self becoming overly and violently obsessed with a young man, leading to her incarceration.
Harriet's decent into dangerous insanity actually seems to help Lillian to return into the world as she finds someone to protect - leading to a sort of 'boys against girls' (also 'insane individual against powerful authority figures') feel to the final standoff in the barricaded hospital room.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect in the context of Poliakoff's later work is the early section dealing with Lillian being taken from the decomissioned mental hospital and back home, with Hugh's attempting to teach her how they relate by describing their family history. A later work like Perfect Strangers involves a character outside of the main family being introduced to all of its intricacies and relationships, however here Lillian can't retain or really understand any of that information. Her flashbacks that 'explain' why she was locked away cannot be communicated to others (unlike say Shooting The Past where every series of pictures is a story waiting to be told, or invented, for a particular purpose), just inform her own actions. Eventually uncovering the 'mystery' (as in Hidden City) becomes less important than how the process of discovery in itself affects the characters.