London wants to see tough films for hard times

12 April 2012

Six days in and the 55th London Film Festival has already yielded a fine harvest of intriguing movies. But it ain't a barrel of laughs. Just look at the gala films. We opened with Fernando Meirelles's 360, a daisy-chain of infidelity, grief, prostitution and murder. Then came - if you'll pardon the expression- Steve McQueen's Shame, which intertwines sex addiction and suicide. Then Ralph Fiennes's directorial debut, Coriolanus: stabby Shakespeare, bleak Balkan setting.

Tonight it's We Need to Talk About Kevin, a sunny yarn dealing with a schoolyard massacre and the failure of maternal-filial affection. Coming up is David Cronenberg's psychodrama about Freud and Jung, A Dangerous Method, and Michael Winterbottom's Trishna, an Indian adaptation of Thomas Hardy's relentlessly doomy Tess. Plus not one but two earnest George Clooney dramas.

It's going to be a long, sober haul - with only Madonna's W.E. possibly furnishing light relief - to the closing gala, The Deep Blue Sea, in which Rachel Weisz goes for a splash about on a sunny Caribbean beach. Only joking. She's a thwarted post-war housewife obsessed with a younger man.

There's a bit of suicide in this one, too.
Flippancy aside, it strikes me that there's a new seriousness in the culture at the moment. Artists and audiences alike seem to be pulling a collective solemn face. The truism used to be that during hard times, like this recession-crunch-whatever we're in, people want escapist entertainment. Bread and circuses, bells and whistles. In theatre this means musicals, while on screen it means car chases, bosoms and jokes. But this season's multiplex car-chase movie, Drive, is a magnificently glum affair, untroubled by raunch or humour, in which Ryan Gosling's trapped stuntman rearranges people's centre partings with a hammer. Even Will Ferrell's gone serious, playing an alcoholic in the Raymond Carver adaptation Everything Must Go.

And the appetite for work that sets out to challenge rather than just entertain goes beyond our cinema screens. Last week I went to the first revival for years of Edward Bond's Saved, the notoriously harsh depiction of a Sixties underclass in which a baby is stoned to death. The audience was rapt. A likely frontrunner in this year's Evening Standard Theatre Awards is Mike Leigh's Grief, a pitch-perfect evocation of quiet desperation in the post-war London suburbs. The judges for this year's Man Booker Prize may have set great store by "readability", but the likely winner at tomorrow's ceremony, Julian Barnes's A Sense of an Ending, packs lost love, mental illness and the realisation of a life wasted into its 150 pages. Tate Britain's current big show, by John Martin, contemplates the Apocalypse.

Maybe we're intellectually tougher than we think. We can look at headlines that make the soul plummet, then demand a rigorous mental workout in our theatres, cinemas and galleries. Perhaps the ancient Greeks were right about tragedy providing spectators with catharsis - a purging or cleansing of negative emotion.

The modern Greeks, mind you, could probably do with a bit of a laugh right now. And perhaps we'll only know we've finally turned the economic corner when our cinemas are once again full of brainless frat-boy comedies and our galleries with pictures of clowns. This could indeed be what David Cameron meant by the happiness index.

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