Cinema
A Letter to Brezhnev ('15', selected cinemas)
Fantasies of elsewhere
Peter Ackroyd
Most of the short films which accom- pany the main 'feature' in the course of a cinema programme are ignored, not least by the audience, who justifiably hold in contempt a travelogue on the merits of Verona or a documentary on the skills of a watch-repairer. But there are some 'shorts, which make perfect use of the time and space allotted to them — The Woman Who Married Clark Gable is one of them. I suspect that it has been made by young or at least new film-makers, and clearly it has been produced on a low budget; but these are advantages here, just as the black-and- white in which it has been filmed can on one level be seen as an economy but is in addition used brilliantly to evoke the nostalgic dimness of that particular me- dium.
The setting is Dublin in the mid-Thirties, and the narrative concerns a middle-aged woman (married to the formidable Bob Hoskins) who fantasises about her rela- tionship with the Gable of the large screen- Where the film excelled was in its painstak- ing and indeed painful depiction of lives as sober as they are constricted — the fantas- tic aspirations of the woman are never sentimentalised, therefore, since confined circumstances breed more intensely longed for, and more intensely realised, dreams. In some ways that disparity between reality and fantasy was difficult to watch — and this because it represented a collective, rather than simply an individual, experi- ence. Everything in the film confirmed this, since it was established upon an account of the most ordinary things — the routine, the boredom, the sudden high spirits and the slow decay of hope. It was a stroke of real art, for example, to show the profile of Clark Gable as he wandered through the ruined streets of San Francisco after an earthquake, only then to depict
the damp tenements of Dublin crowded upon a street as straight and as hopeless as a dead limb. The Woman Who Married Clark Gable was very short but it was Perfect of its kind — and, curiously enough, a fitting prelude to A Letter to Brezhnev. For this, too, is a film about those fanciful aspirations which are im- paled upon a hard and obtrusive reality. It is set in Liverpool, a city whose inhabitants seem to have cornered the commercial market in urban toughness and a certain ungracious wit, and concerns two girls who suffer pangs of unrequited love after a night with a pair of Russian sailors. So one of them writes the eponymous letter, and is last seen heading for Moscow. The whole tone of the film suggests that she has made the right decision, and it has to be said that the north of England has rarely looked more unattractive than it does here. A Letter to Brezhnev is couched in what might be described as the 'style' of social realism, which has become just another phrase for urban gloom — the concrete, the wet pavements, the gro- tesque pubs, the council houses, and the cheerful but shallow life which is supposed to spring from such things. The film is actually conceived and executed so well that this insistent mood (once known fami- liarly as melodrama) is camouflaged to a certain extent, but it is hard to agree with the almost universal critical belief that all this is somehow 'very real' — a film 'about contemporary Britain'. It is not in fact very 'real' at all, but is essentially an agreeable light romance which has been conflated with urban farce to produce something not dissimilar to Bill Forsyth's pictures of working-class Scottish It would be quite wrong to suggest that the narrative makes some significant con- tribution to the debate about the nation or, rather, 'two nations'. You might just as Well try and extract a social message from Minder, a television series which is also based upon a sentimental idealisation of working-class culture. There are a few references to unemployment, but they are of a desultory sort and suggest only that the director and writer wanted to show that their hearts were in approximately the right place.
Fortunately their intelligence and im- agination are to be found in the film itself, which proceeds with great animation and enthusiasm. The two girls in particular were very good: one rather pert, with a propensity for hurling abuse at her nearest and dearest, while the other was a bright and even brassy harridan in the barmaid style. Since the latter was also a modern variant of the 'tart with a heart of gold', it was obviously considered essential for her to reveal hidden depths in the last reel; but, since she was also very funny, the obeisance to conventional sentiment was for once acceptable. These heroines were caricatures, of course, but they were at least interesting Ones — in contrast to the Russian sailors, for example, who seemed to have done nothing to earn the girls' undenying devo- tion. It also seemed a little odd that the putative emigrant should encounter such formidable opposition to her decision to travel to the Soviet Union — in the present state of Liverpool opinion, it would not have been a surprise to find that the council had bought a dacha for her. Those of a conservative temperament might ob- ject to her dewy-eyed attitude towards the Soviet Union, but it is really no different from the housewife's love affair with the United States in the late Forties. And, in any case, A Letter to Brezhnev was often very funny.
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