Cinema
Goodbye sailor
Peter Ackroyd
Remembrance (`AA', Screen on the Hill)
This is a film about young sailors but, before the dirty mackintosh brigade start lining up outside the little cinema in Relsize Park, I must warn them that it is not a Pretty sight. The navy may once have beer, 'rum, bum and 'baccy' but now it is °eel', fear and vomit. Remembrance begins, fetchingly, with a rendition of 'A life on the Ocean Waves' but the only real water we see is the rain of England. An extremely drunk young man is staggering through the wet streets of Plymouth; he wanders into a night-club patronised by naval ratings, who fling broken bottles at his feet as he dances to the ferocious music inside his own head. It is his last dance: a bouncer attacks him s,c) violently that he relapses into a coma from which he never recovers.
This is, to use a perhaps inappropriate Word, the left-motif; the rest of the film concerns the last few hours on shore of a number of naval ratings who are about to sail on a Nato exercise. Their lives are characterised here by the coarse monotony O!' day, and the drunken inconsequence of night: 'I don't miss anything when I'm away,' explains one rating and one can see whY not — they are all in flight from wives or parents who combine dreariness with Whining incomprehension. This essentially anecdotal film links such scenes with shots ,°f the comatose boy lying in a hospital bed: he acts as a symbol which is either too clear they are all of them wounded — or not clear enough. This is a familiar, not to say fashionable, vniew of English life: depressing, mean- i"gtess, lit by gratuitous violence and
dampened by the presence of a number of dopy-looking young men who have nothing to say for themselves. But the film is so unrelenting in its gloom and seediness that it becomes somewhat artificial — what we are being offered here is a contemporary version of melodrama, in which a simple and rather obvious mood is imposed upon the narrative and forces it into an arbitrary shape.
It should be noted that Remembrance has also been made for television (it will appear soon on Channel Four), and it bears the marks of television drama both in its method and in its assumptions. The camera lingers on the detritus of domestic life, peering at it closely as if it might extract some meaning from it. In the same way the film concentrates upon the ordinary lives of ordinary people as if that were enough to guarantee significance to the enterprise.
In this sense, films made for television represent the dilemma of contemporary realism, caught as it is upon the twin horns of egalitarianism — why have Lear when a peasant will do? — and the search for generalised social 'significance'. But naval ratings are not interesting and one's sense of how boring they are is only confirmed by their presence upon the screen. If that sounds like snobbery, then so be it. Of course, sensible people might accuse me of rank injustice as well as snobbery — this is, after all, a film about young men who are protecting the interests of our nation overseas. But that indicates the failure of the film: in its sentimental and fashionably coarse-grained insistence upon the minutiae of their lives, it offers no explanation, or imaginative context, for that sense of duty and discipline which in reality they possess.
No art can survive without selection and proper emphasis: that is why, in Shakespearian drama, the equivalent of naval ratings were introduced as light relief or the material of 'low' comedy. Is that snobbery, or an exact appreciation of one scale of human awareness? When `low' life • is presented as the only life, when human drama is levelled out in the manner of Re- membrance, it forfeits the kind of imagina- tive substance which alone can give force to a narrative: and this film collapses into a number of scrappy and unintegrated scenes which rely upon the patience or the collab- 'Look at that! Eight gramophone records, the Bible and Shakespeare.' oration of the audience to give them shape.
Remembrance, by scanning the surface of a number of lives, is doing only the minimum required of it — it is a lazy method, evading the responsibilities of thematic shape or imaginative understan- ding. It has been said that the English cinema is now in the process of revival, and that the collaboration between television and cinema offers the possibility of a popular, and financially viable, art. That is no doubt the case; but such a revival is not well served by a film which simply rides on the back of our culture — adding nothing to it and, by default, taking something away.
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