Cinema
Haunted by the past
Hilary Mantel
The swimming pool is palm-fringed and a dazzling blue; on a sunshine-coloured air-bed there bobs a film star, biceps glistening, eyes twinkling, large teeth glint- ing, Star of David medallion nestling on bronzed and lightly furred chest. He is the very stuff of gossip columns, of movie magazines, of the Californian dream. He picks up a revolver, puts it into his mouth, pulls the trigger and is sucked under the water into a whirlpool of blood.
In London, his lifelong friend is chain- smoking over a typewriter. It is 1954. This is the land of the dim fringed table lamp, the Lloyd Loom chair, the coin-in-the-slot gas-meter. Special Branch men, while keeping tabs on foreigners, slurp up their dinners in seedy caffs. Rain streams down the windows, and the whole of England seems to be painted with a treacle-brown varnish or with that old shade of stale- vegetable green that has now vanished from the decorator's palette.
Not knowing that his friend Clifford is dead, Asa Kaufman (Ron Silver) applies himself to sample scripts for commercial television. His Hollywood days behind him, the memory of starlets and pool-
parties fading in Britain's thin mean air, he must adopt an alias in order to get himself onto the screenwriting team of The Adven- tures of Robin Hood. Soon trusty broad- swords will be drawn, and the welkin will ring with merrie peals of forced laughter. All is not well in the greenwood. Betrayal rustles behind every bush.
Clifford and Asa are both former mem- bers of the Communist Party, and Holly- wood leftists are being hunted out by the House Un-American Activities Commit- tee. In flashback, we move to 1943, to naïve and idealistic young men who can say 'the Red Army is saving civilisation' — and who no doubt regret that they missed the civil war in Spain. Post-war, their world- view has received a few jolts. Many of them are in analysis; but are Marx and Freud compatible? Is analysis simply a bourgeois solution to bourgeois problems? Will personal torment cease when the state withers away? Fortunately, there is one Party-approved therapist, Jerry Leavy (Daniel J. Travanti); there is no reason, at the time, to suppose he is not a devoted guardian of his clients' confidences.
So Asa sweats on the couch, not only about his marital problems and his writer's block, but about what he should do when he is invited by the Committee to list the 'subversives', the 'saboteurs', the Party members and the fellow travellers of his acquaintance. He can betray his friends, or he can lose his livelihood, part from his family and try to make a life in another country with problems, suspicions and divisions of its own. 'We have a different set of values over here,' a BBC producer tells him. 'You'll be reminded of it every pay-day.' Asa decides to pay for his princi- ples. But when you pay for your principles you pay on the instalment plan, and you never know what final price will be asked.
Philip Saville's thoughtful and very en- joyable film is the result of a partnership between the BBC and the American corb- pany Home Box Office. It has an econo- mical and witty screenplay by Michael Eaton, and its style is layered, allusive and gleefully cinematic. It moves from parody to pastiche, through flashback and dream sequence, through the past lives of its characters and through the strata of their consciousness. Refusing to make heroes, victims or villains of its characters, it touches on philosophical issues that the cinema usually leaves alone. At times its structure is confusing, and though Imogen Stubbs gives a credible performance in the role of Clifford's ex-mistress, her character seems largely redundant, thrown in as make-weight romantic interest. The con- clusion seems evasive, too; but such a history of ambiguity, ambivalence and doubt has been packed into 95 minutes that perhaps it is unreasonable to hope for a tidy resolution. Films of such sophistica- tion and style are rare, so the title Fellow Traveller is already a speculative jotting on the 'Best Films of 1990' list.
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