ARTS
Cinema
Beating time
Peter Ackroyd
Clockwise (PG', selected cinemas) John Cleese might not represent every- body's idea of a good time, but there is no doubt that he can embody a certain type of English madness — the anxious confor- mist, with a peremptory or bullying man- ner which under the slightest pressure degenerates into hysteria. And, in Clock- wise, he plays the role which might have been created by nature for him; he is a headmaster and he runs his thoroughly modern comprehensive school as if it were Versailles — or rather, given the vast array of technical equipment on display, as if it were the headquarters of NASA.
The film opens as Brian Stimpson is about to travel to Norwich in order to take up his appointment as chairman of the Headmasters' Conference. As he tells everyone within hearing range, this is the first time that the headmaster of a compre- hensive school has been so honoured; and, taking its cue from his combination of anxious self-esteem and fawning gratitude, Clockwise might have examined the more pedestrian social 'issues' at work here. But, fortunately, it does not. The long tradition of school humour has triumphed over the demands of political realism, and Michael Frayn's wonderful script puts Clockwise firmly in the honourable line of cinematic farce.
There is more to farce than generally meets the eye, however, and one of its great strengths lies in its ability to concen- trate in a peculiarly intense way on certain forms of human weakness: Stimpson, for example, is more than just the sum of Cleese's various comic routines. He suffers from every conceivable variety of anxiety; if you put him in the Garden of Eden, he would panic. For some reason he is ashamed of his wife, worried about his job, but, more importantly, he is obsessed with everyone and everything being 'on time'. It is generally taken for granted that people who are excessively punctual tend to suffer from some form of unappeased and un- appeasable guilt: this is never emphasised in the film, but it hardly needs to be since the various Furies which perch on Stimp- son's shoulder can be glimpsed in the havoc which he causes. The face of the clock, and its more modern digital forms, haunts him; it enslaves him; and then it breaks him.
The film is concerned with his journey to the conference at Norwich, but it is not so much a journey as an ordeal, rivalling that of Bunyan's pilgrim or of Blake's `desart wanderer'. He boards the wrong train; his wife takes the car; telephones don't work; another car is stuck in a field and, in a succession of incidents too grotesque to describe, he is finally chased across Nor- folk by two squads of policemen and various enraged personages. This is a world gone awry (or, to use the fashionable academic phrase, 'turned upside down') in all the predictable ways — the difference being that Stimpson takes everything as a grossly personal affront and decides to counter-attack. The boots of cars and the sides of telephone kiosks are subjected to violence and humiliation — there is a theory of comedy which states that inani- mate objects should be treated as if they were instinct with life, and in Clockwise it reaches its apotheosis.
Cleese's humour is at the heart of it. The more things go wrong, the more he tries to stay calm by reaching a state of terrible rigidity: in moments like this, his smile would be more at home on Yorick's bony countenance. But he can only freeze him- self for a short space of time; then his limbs begin to twist in various directions, as if they were trying to abandon his body and find somewhere to bury themselves; and, at last, he is reduced to a gibbering mania.
As a result Clockwise is not wholly or simply a farce, and there are moments when Frayn adds to the complexity of the film's 'business' by including scenes of a quite different kind. A trio of old ladies, for example, drift in and out of the picture miming various forms of dementia. One talks endlessly and maliciously about an absent relative — 'It would be an unfair temptation to put a sherry glass in her hand' — and another just wanders. 'I don't know where I am or what I am,' she says, adding a perceptibly macabre note to the generally demented fun. The script is very resourceful and, when Stimpson finds the Norwich road again after a series of mis- adventures, he seems even more discon- certed: 'It's not the despair. I can stand the despair. It's the hope.'
And so this story of desperate flight and futile wandering might be seen as an allegory of human experience, but one wrought to such a pitch of intensity that the fragmented scenes and images might have been taken from the landscape of human dreams. Certainly the film acquires a phan- tasmagoric quality beyond the conditions of ordinary farce. There is a sequence at the very end when Stimpson, by now crushed with the burden of the time and rendered grotesque through the failure of his aspirations, finally arrives at the Head- masters' Conference. This is the moment he has anticipated and dreaded all his life, this entry into the world of the 'establish- ment'. But he is wearing a torn suit which he has stolen from another motorist, and he has no socks. He strides up to the platform with an alarming vigour; finally exposed in front of them all, he starts talking nonsense — 'Imagine a spacecraft that was continually interrupted by late callers . . . .' Then, in his demented state, he asks the assembled headmasters to sing 'To be a Pilgrim'. And he is taken away. It is almost too painful to be funny, but it is very funny nonetheless.
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