Cinema
Unhappy medium
Peter Ackroyd
The Ploughman's Lunch ('15', Gate Notting Hill) linmy Penfield, the central character in
this film, is a BBC journalist; he is .a man without qualities, whose understanding of the world and of other people is established solely upon the principle of self-interest. He is willing to describe himself as a socialist or as a conservative patriot as the occasion
i demands, and his major talent lies in encap- sulating 'the news' in carefully timed segments for radio broadcasts. He is an outline waiting to be filled, and contem-
porary fads or mannerisms invade the emp- ty space where his will and intelligence should be. His parents are London lower middle class whom he rarely visits and, at the close of the film, he is seen looking at his watch at his mother's funeral. If he had a
it 'Past' one might say that he had betrayed — except that it is clear that for him the Past does not exist in any private sense. It is a remarkably accurate portrait of a
certain kind of Englishman — a child of the 'media age' or the 'welfare state', according to taste, who has been anaesthetised against any attempt to examine his own values or those of his culture. He is writing a book about Suez, but it is for 'the American Market', and is designed to make simple Points about the fading glory of the E m- pire. Such a man is indeed representative, not only of those lower middle class leaders Who are now fashioning the national mood but also of a society which relies more and more heavily upon meretricious images and symbols in the place of more traditional knowledge. It is an England which has video _cassettes of the Falklands conflict, an England in which 'Victorian values' are the benzedrine of the political process, and in vv.hich. 'the ploughman's lunch' of the film's title Is a merchandising gimmick to attract businessmen to pubs refurbished in mock- Edwardian style. The petty betrayals of Penfield and his 'media' friends are seen here to be related to some more fundamen- tal betrayal.
It is an ambitious theme which, although
explored many times in fiction, has rarely been translated into cinematic terms. This is Perplexing: it would seem to find its natural Place on film, since film is in some measure responsible for the cultural decay which is being diagnosed. The director, Richard _Eyre, and the script writer, Ian McEwan, have now found a nerve just below the sur- face of English life although I am not sure the film.
at they have successfully isolated it within The virtues of The Ploughman's Lunch are relatively straightforward Ones. Jonathan Pryce plays the anti-hero with a remarkable attention to detail: he has that wounded look of someone whose vanity is perpetually being assaulted and he conveys very well the raddled charm of the dispossessed. Tim Curry is adept, too, at playing the 'smoothie' — the young political journalist who believes he can manipulate the world only because he does not understand it. And the script is often very funny, exhibiting at its best a kind of gleeful dourness at the spectacle of the depravity and foolishness of human beings.
These are manifest virtues, sustained here by Mr Eyre's direction which is noticeably low-key. There is one problem with the pic- ture, however, for which perhaps no par- ticular blame can be assigned: it seems to share the thinness, and in part the drabness, of the culture which it is anatomising. One scene may suggest what I mean. About half-way through the film, the radio reporter stumbles by chance upon a women's peace camp which is meant to resemble that of Greenham Common. He might have entered a meeting of the Women's Institute, so polite and well- meaning and helpful the ladies seem. It was a sentimentalised version of the truth, close in spirit to the heroic figures of 'official' Soviet art, and one or two members of the audience actually laughed at its distance from the truth of the situation. It is a small note in the film, but definitely a false one, and it suggests a certain intellectual laziness on the part of those who are professing to offer a convincing and realistic account of contemporary English life. Here, in a socie- ty dominated by false values, were ap- parently women who had a sense of true values; here were people who had not suc- cumbed to the extravagant cynicism or irony of those who run, or report upon, the nation's affairs. It is simply not credible — I am not accusing the film makers of bad faith, only of bad art. They were relying upon a stock response to such campaigners; they were investing in a cliche which should be examined as least as carefully as the pretensions of the politicians and jour- nalists are examined in the film.
This element of intellectual or im- aginative laziness is in fact the film's most worrying characteristic. It is, after all, a bit much to accuse a nation of losing its sense of history and then show no evidence of knowing anything at all before 1956. And this foreshortened perspective is actually destructive of the film's theme — certain parallels are made between the Suez crisis and the Falklands conflict which, because they were simplistic, are unsatisfactory. And yet it was precisely upon this point that the moral weight of the film is supposed to bear. The Ploughman's Lunch shares the same historical and cultural blindness of which the characters themselves are representative; the film is too narrow in its focus and in its preoccupations.
The central theme is an ambitious and in- teresting one, but it is not one that can pro- perly be developed by examining the lives of two or three bored or cynical young jour- nalists; any account of contemporary life can, in these terms, be only superficially constructed and we end up with a skittish and occasionally inconsequential satire. It suggests a serious statement without in the end being able to make one, a political analysis of '0' level standard tacked onto a sometimes funny caricature of certain stock `types'. It is not quite enough.
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