Cinema
Out of Order ('15', Metro) Spicy Rice (PG', Premiere Swiss Centre)
Taking the rap
Hilary Mantel According to the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Goering didn't at all say that whenever he heard the word 'culture' he reached for his revolver; but we all have Goering-words, and it is `workshop' that makes me wish I were armed. 'Workshop' coupled with 'video' should alarm and inflame the mildest of us. But because of its antecedents, Out of Order seemed worth a look; after all, it was funded by the BFI and Channel 4 and shown at the London Film Festival last year, so somebody must have rated it at some stage. The heart sinks, though, upon finding it billed as 'a musical for the club generation'.
The setting is Fatcher's Britain, innit? In a tiresomely surrealistic version of Telford New Town, a lad called Anthony and his mates find themselves at odds with society: they lament unemployment and haunt the supermarkets and shopping malls. A pirate station called Radio Giro, run by 'rapping duo Glynis and Kerry' provides a commen- tary on the action. Anthony decides to better himself by joining the police, and thus offends group norms; particularly, he offends his girlfriend Jaz, a shoplifting ingenue who has a very pronounced mili- tant tendency. Eventually one of PC Anthony's freaky friends is locked up in the cells at the local station; Anthony's loyalties are tried, but not so much as the viewer's temper.
Out Of Order is a polemic against the police, racialism, unemployment etc --- but since it has taken six years to get the thing on to film, the polemic has grown stale, and the wit — probably never nimble has developed a defeated and geriatric air. Anthony is a clean-cut young man of such shining decency and probity that you hope he will quickly be made Chief Constable, and the film will be over. As for the `rapping duo', those squawking human metronomes, you feel you would do any- thing to make them stop. From time to time sundry `TV personalities' flit in and out. Presumably there is some parodic intention. The effect isn't, as intended, light-heartedly iconoclastic; it is just over- whelmingly silly.
The originators of the project are Jonnie Turpie and Graham Peet (note the names of this pair, Turpie and Peet, and give them a wide berth) and a body called the Dead Honest Soul Searchers (DHSS, ged- dit?). Keen and youthful they must have been, six years ago, the DHSS; are they now, you wonder, old enough to be embar- rassed, or are they stuck in some socio- political time-warp? The film's publicity folder is splashed with a claim that Out of Order 'declares war on boredom'. Bore- dom wins; there isn't even a sharp skir- mish.
Spicy Rice is a small, monochrome, low-budget production with more genuine and urgent concerns; something to cry for, as nanny would say. You hope DHSS will see it, and blush; and that other people will see it too, because it is a funny, touching and finally desolating story, made with care and skill by Jan Schutte, a West German whose field until now has been the documentary.
Hamburg in winter seems painfully real, dirty snow banked against public buildings, car tyres swishing through the rain and slush; and Shezad (Bhasker) a young Pakistani, is being thrown out of a Chinese restaurant where he is trying to sell flow- ers. Huddled into his jacket and scarf, foreign, cold-looking but not dispirited, he traverses subway corridors, takes a bus; climbs the stairs of his hostel, its corridors echoing with exiled polyglot tones, and puts his flowers in water to wait for another day. Shezad's precarious and hostile world is controlled by faces behind glass screens: If you've got any questions, go to Room 120.'
Soon afterwards, he finds himself back at the restaurant working in the kitchen, and strikes up a relationsip with Xiao (Ric Young), a Chinese waiter. They can only communicate in basic German, and it is only when the lonely, anxious 'guest- workers' are speaking German that we are given subtitles; so the audience shares their chronic confusion, the need to grasp at anything that seems significant and build on its insecure foundation. Like them, we come to fear the buff envelopes of the `Aliens Department'.
Shezad and Xiao dream of opening a restaurant together; in the face of penury and bureaucracy, they succeed. We know their success won't last, but still they seem to have struck a blow for themselves. This chronicle of marginal lives is not depress- ing nor sentimental, but full of humour and intelligence: a world away from manufac- tured protest.
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