Customer Reviews

Hidden City [VHS]

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A remarkable film made for the BBC's Film On Four, Stephen Poliakoff's 'Hidden City' stars Charles Dance as a statistician in the midst of something of a middle-aged crisis. Waylaid by an aggressive (and abrasive) young woman who claims he cost her her job at a government film archive, he finds himself draughted into the search for a series of apparently benign industrial films that have inexplicably wound up classified as secret. At first unwilling to take part in the quest, he gradually becomes sucked into a bewildering secret world hidden within and beneath London, where bowler-hatted Masons have to pick their way through the garbage piled in front of the alleyway entrances of their secret meeting halls, and decades worth of classified information piles in drifts in decomissioned underground air raid shelters. In the process the two seekers, who are united only by their vague sense of dissatisfaction and a need for something - anything - else, discover that so many secrets are being kept by their government that the reasons much of it was ever considered sensitive have themselves been lost to time. Worse yet, the accumulation has grown so enormous that random culls are being implemented just to make room in the archives for the latest generation of secrets, with stacks of film and documents selected at random for disposal. When the second film in the series they have been seeking turns out to contain a glimpse of what might be an abduction in the background of a street scene, it's a race against time to find the next instalment, which may already have been sent to a rubbish tip...

Melancholy, romantic, utterly modern, and only sort-of a conspiracy film, it is incomprehensible that 'Hidden City' has somehow managed to avoid building the cult following it so richly deserves. Apparently, though it aired on British television, it never received a video release there, and was only released in North America by Sony in a very limited way. I haven't seen a copy (other than my own treasured print) in a decade at least, so maybe the reason it's unknown is that no one's seen it. Which is criminal.

This and the British miniseries 'Edge of Darkness' (another ostensible conspiracy film that works so brillianty on so many other levels) need North American DVD releases. I see a slew of other Poliakoff films are making it to disc - dare we hope we might see this one, too?

I saw this film many years ago on UK TV and had the foresight to copy it to tape. Unfortunately over the years the tape has been lost to that vast VHS library that now occupies my loft. Unable to obtain a copy in the UK I was delighted when I tracked down a pre-recorded version in the US that I collected on my recent holiday. Poliakoff is a rare talent and the themes of history, family relationships, secrets, visual media and all things that lurk beneath, which are always liberally scattered throughout his works make viewing an absorbing experience. Hidden City is no exception and although it lacks some of the polish of his later offerings, possibly because he is a better writer than he is a director, it is nonetheless a must for all fans of his work and a worthy introduction for those yet to be smitten.

I was looking for another movie. This one was terrible. Lame is the only word I can think of. It isn't the sellers fault but I will be more careful next time. The condition of the video also was fair - poor.