Customer Reviews

Red Road

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a first film by the director, Andrea Arnold, and the lead, Kate Dickie, and the first of an intended series by a group of Scottish film makers to be set around the same group of characters. I have no idea where it will go from here, but this film presents a complete picture, a circle of tragedy that closes.

This is the type of film where a story starts in the middle and progresses without any setup exposition, you have to figure out on your own where it's going. Sometimes films like this drive me crazy, but it works in spades here, particularly during a stunning sexual encounter where all you can think is, what the heck is this woman doing? Why is she letting this happen? There could be more than one answer, it could just be lonely lust, that possibility exists, and then . . . well, the answer is revealed, and while it was hinted at, there is no way to anticipate what happens, nor how it all turns out.

If you love film, you must see this, and support these individuals. Their instincts for what appears on the screen are spot on, and I look forward to their next effort. Two small warnings; the sex is graphic, and the Glasgow accents pretty thick, English subtitles are not necessarily out of place.

There are few films, not to speak of books (such as those written by Paul West), that focus on and reveal liminal space, or the "in-between." Red Road does this magnificently. The protagonist is a woman whose job is to watch cameras that provide surveillance around the city, to prevent and report crimes--and so she is a watcher of others rather than having agency herself. And there are moving episodes here, where she follows individuals with pets--with whom they have a relationship--and when she comes across one of these individuals with his dog, he and she look into a store window and have no relationship with each other.

There are a number of scenes where Kate Dickie, as the protagonist, is on the margins--at the wedding of her friend, for example. It is only at the end of the film that one has a glimpse of this pattern of liminality changing, when she stops to greet a man with his dog who are crossing the street.

The photography is marvelous, especially the early shots of the protagonist's face. While the face is beautiful in and of itself, the camera angles and the shading are stunning.

So to end where I began.... For those of us who have resonance with liminality, for those of us who live on the margins--however described, this is a film to watch.

"Tell me how it happened...I just want to know...please!"

After an incident that left both of them bewildered and shocked, Jackie (Kate Dickie) confronts Clyde (Tony Curran). Clyde is someone from Jackie's past, but just how he's connected to her is still unknown. She simply crossed the street and started shouting at him, and he looks surprised and a bit afraid of her.

Red Road is the astonishing and unforgettable story of Jackie, a CCTV operator who must confront her past in order to wake up from the stupor of her self-imposed isolation.

"The film is called RED ROAD because it's set in the Red Road flats,' explains Carrie Comerford, the film's producer. These flats are so recognizable that they have become a landmark in that part of Glasgow. But the film could have been made in any other city and Jackie's story would remain the same.

As one of the CCTV operators, it is here that Jackie works. Everyday she monitors dozens of screens that feed live footage from cameras installed in the city. Here she constantly observes and watches its inhabitants, amused by their idiosyncracies and in a way, knowing them by familiarity. There is the elderly man who regularly walks his dog at night, the lady cleaner who dances her way into the office building while listening to her Walkman, the prostitute who tries to make conversation with a potential client, the young men who revel in their drunkenness on their way up to the flats...

These seemingly nameless `strangers' are her constant companions. She knows them almost intimately, but they remain beyond her reach; she cannot talk to them or have them invite her for coffee. She watches silently, the cameras allowing her to observe them from a distance. Until one day, she sees someone, a man who has brought so much pain and sorrow. She watches him closely, wondering if she is not mistaken. Then she knows. She simply knows it is him. She decides its time to get closer and confront him.

What makes this film unique and memorable is the way the story is told. It has a deliberately slow pace and we see bits and pieces of various events - some are reminders of the past, and we learn that Jackie is a woman who has seen better days. Now she is isolated and alone, a choice she took upon herself. Although she has a family, we can feel the tension, for example when she attends her sister's wedding. As we follow her story, we learn that not everything is what it seems.

First-time director Andrea Arnold has created a film that is both powerful and poignant, hypnotic and mysterious. It is both a thriller and a modern take on noir. It's an exploration of guilt and despair and ultimately of letting go, probing into the unknown and the familiar. Red Road is a powerful story with an amazing and intelligent cast. The two lead actors, Kate Dickie and Tony Curran, are particularly good. Dickie is unforgettable as Jackie - she portrays a woman on the verge of despair, but one who remains defiant and gutsy as she faces her tormentor. Curran puts in a strong performance as a man who has made too many mistakes, but who wants to live a straight life.

The film won the Jury Prize at Cannes, and also garnered major awards at the BAFTAs. There is a certain beauty and honesty in Red Road, something that is so uncommon today.

A very impressive first outing for director, Andrea Arnold. Other reviewers have revealed the plot and the intrigue attending Jackie's(Kate Dickie)stalking through surveillance cameras of Clyde(Tony Curran), and eventual liason with him. The film is set in the grimy margins of Glasgow, where every fluttering leaf of activity caught on camera might arouse suspicion. So what is this lonely woman's obsession with Clyde? Arnold's gift of telling is remarkable. The ultra close-up framing of the leads' faces, the agile, hand-held camera made a tour de force by Lars Von Trier, effects our complicity in her quest for resolution. We are only a step behind her own awareness, her own motives, as she literally lays herself bare, sacrifices her dignity, to absolve the trauma that has frozen her. The sexual explicitness makes us feel her dilema and sympathise with Clyde's subsequent confusion.Someone said that the best thrillers burrow inward, and by the sheer power of cinematic observation make it hard for us to look away less we miss something. 'Red Road'is such a film.

Jackie may not have much of a life of her own, but she has found a way to live vicariously through the lives of others. As an employee of the city of Gloscow, Scotland, her job is to monitor the security cameras that have been strategically placed throughout the city and to report any suspicious activity or possible crimes she sees to the local authorities. For the most part, she keeps a respectful distance from those she's observing, contenting herself with following the course of their lives as a generally dispassionate observer. That all changes, however, when one night, much to her horror, she spots the man, who was recently convicted in the deaths of her husband and daughter, walking freely through the streets of the city, his sentence overturned on a technicality. Jackie decides that she must now take matters into her own hands to procure for herself and for her loved ones the justice the legal system has clearly denied them.

"Red Road" is a taut, tantalizing thriller that turns into a touching human drama in its closing stages. For most of the movie, Jackie is obsessed with exacting revenge on the man who destroyed her life. She follows him around, first through the various monitors that record his every public move, then in person as she literally stalks him through the streets of the city. It is at this point that Jackie crosses over the line from passive observer to active manipulator of events. At times, her obsession seems to take on an almost erotic tone, particularly after she makes personal contact with him several times, making this yet another forbidden line Jackie threatens to cross. Yet, the movie is much more than a mere tale of erotic obsession; it is a complex study of the stages a grieving soul must go through before it can finally let go of the past, confer forgiveness when forgiveness seems least possible, and achieve the peace it so achingly longs for.

Kate Dickie is both intense and poignant as the woman trying to come to terms with her overwhelming tragedy. In an intriguing example of the media becoming the message, director Andrea Arnold keeps her camera tightly focused on the character at all times, almost as if we, too, were watching Jackie's life as though through a monitor. Tony Curran is also very effective as the man who may not be quite as evil as Jackie has convinced herself that he is.

By holding her cards close to the vest, Arnold never reveals more of the mystery than we need to know at any given time. We don't always understand exactly what is going on or why Jackie acts in the way she does, but this ambiguity only heightens our desire to see the story through to the end. And that ending, when it comes, is a beautiful and richly rewarding one, as the movie takes us to a place we hadn't expected it to at any point prior to its arrival.

Two caveats may be in order, however, one fairly minor, the other quite major. The minor one is that the heavy Scottish accents make much of the dialogue virtually incomprehensible to those of us with more Western-oriented ears. Luckily, the filmmakers have headed off the problem by kindly providing subtitles for us. The more serious warning involves a graphic sex scene later on in the film in which the action is anything but simulated. Those easily offended by such activity had best be forewarned

This movie was different, to say the least. Initially slow moving, the pace picks up when the lead character, Jackie, encounters the man, Clyde(played by the delicious and ginger, Tony Curran)who she believed was still imprisoned for his role in destroying part of her life. Jackie becomes obsessed with confronting Clyde, but spends most of the film slowly building up the courage, first stalking, and then resorting to a more subdued form of vengeance before the final honest confrontation they both need to heal.

*This movie has some pretty graphic sex scenes.

Set in Glasgow, a woman who watches closed circuit TV all day for the police gets obsessed with a particular man she believes
may be a criminal (shades of Rear Window). She personally starts to track him, wrapping us up in her voyeurism.

Gradually, piece by piece, the whys behind the story fall into place, and we are ultimately lead to some very emotional territory.

Perhaps the ending twists are a bit pat, or quick, but they worked for me. If Mike Leigh made a Hitchcock film,
it might be something like this. (An amazing version of `Love Will Tear Us Apart' over the end credits gave me shivers).

Seems to me I remember this getting a cinema release in some of the art houses around Chicago and that the critics were quite enamored with it. A film like this doesn't get wide release in the States and even a casual viewer will see why after only a short time into this puzzle of a film.

Here's the scoop. We meet a young lady in Glasgow, Scotland, who works for the police as someone who sits in a room and and looks at video monitors which are fed by the many cameras placed around the city. The area she monitors includes the "Red Road" district of the title. She needs to alert the police if anything bad happens or appears about to happen. She takes note of a guy who she recognizes as having just gotten out of prison and that's where things take off.

This is a singular movie in many ways. The directing is such that it makes it seem as though you're viewing a documentary. Part of this is that you're seeing many people on video monitors fed from crude street cameras. It's as though you're watching real people as opposed to actors. Also is the lighting. I don't know how much of the lighting, if any, is set lighting. It looks as though it were all natural lighting which gives it the documentary feel. Then there are the sets. This is set in, what must be, a lower income part of Glasgow. It's a messy part of the city with a lot of graffiti. It all looks nasty and run down.

Then there's the story. Things unfold (or don't unfold) in an odd manner. Things are happening. Clues are given. But I was well into the story and I still didn't know what was going on. I thought I must have missed something crucial early on. As it turns out I didn't. It just goes a long way before the reasons people do what they do and say what they say are revealed. I found this frustrating. And at a nearly two hour running time it was also a bit exasperating. As much as I liked a lot of what I saw this was a big sticking point. I'm all for pushing the envelope on film making but I think the audience needs to be taken into consideration and I could have used a bit more of that here.

This is well worth watching and a very important addition to the art. But if you choose to give it a go, bring a bit of patience with you.

"Red Road" is an emotionally taut drama centered around a CCTV operator in Glasgow. Jackie, played by Kate Dickie lives a simple life monitoring the CCTV's and coordinating with local police. One day, she notices someone that she recognizes on one of the screens. Tony Curran plays Clyde whom is the star of Jackie's new obsession. What follows is nearly an hour and a half of her following this man growing more and more close to him. It is not until over an hour that we learn bits and pieces of why she has engaged in this cat and mouse game. The way the film was shot begs us to be patient as the answers unfold, which is a great aspect of this movie though the final outcome is a let down.

As I said before the movie takes place in Glasgow. Now, I am normally pretty good at understanding British and Irish dialects; however, I was having a terrible time understanding most of what was said in this movie. The Scottish accent is impossible to understand at times. I wish it would have been subtitled as maybe I could have gotten more involved in the dialogue. For a film reliant so heavily on the script, it was a difficult watch and took a lot away from the impact of the actions on screen.

The plot was an interesting one, but it inevitably fails. I suppose it was a piece more on forgiveness than redemption but the style in which they filmed it was not conducive to learning the lesson they were trying to portray. This film has a really gritty feel to it and was shot beautifully. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan did an amazing job building a very tense atmosphere. His use of shadows and colors really draws the audience into the set pieces. I found myself on pins and needles expecting something incredibly moving or emotional. Sadly, I never quite got there.

"Red Road" has gotten a lot of great reviews on IMDB (6.8/10) and Rotten Tomatoes (88%). I think the reason for this was the cinematography and the acting. Both were outstanding. Katie Dickie and Tony Curran have great chemistry on screen and both seemed to give their all to this project. It's a shame that the film ended the way it did because these two actors could have really pushed the envelope had their been a different avenue to go in.

I really only found one thing that stood out as far as direction goes. That is the way Arnold builds the tension. She only allows small bits of information to come through progressing the story at any given moment. A decision that worked well with the films photography. I was reminded of Michael Haneke who is one of my most favorite directors. This was Andrea Arnold's first full length feature film, had it not been for the actors and cinematography I don't think this movie would have been such a success.

So, is this a thriller? A drama? Or, a mixture of both? For me, the only thing that could put this in the "thriller" genre is the slow pace and the tension. Other than that, this is a drama. Many reviews say as a thriller this works, but for me it just falls flat. I feel like the director should have stuck to one genre. In my opinion the movie would have been much more powerful had it kept the plot and was shot as a drama or changed the plot and shot as a thriller.

[...]

Red Road takes you through the ups and downs in one woman's world. Hers is a struggle of inner turmoil and strength, depression and letting go. The photography is gritty and real, while the actors in this film are superb. I felt like I was there, in the room with these people. I hope to see much more of this director and the actors whom opened themselves up and let the characters shine.