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AKA
***
Cinema Releases - November 1, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. UK.
123 minutes. Written and directed by Duncan Roy. Starring Matthew Leitch,
George Asprey, Lindsey Coulson, Diana Quick, Blake Ritson, Peter Youngblood
Hills.
If Duncan Roy's publicist is to be believed,
"AKA" was made for less than £300,000. I dunno. The film
uses many lavish settings that double for places all over England, France
and Italy; there is a large cast; the visuals are a complex stylistic experiment.
The explanation, I hear, is that the actors were not paid, the film was made
with lottery money and so National Trust locations were freely available
to the producers, and the shooting was done on digital video. My mind is
filled with questions: If there was lottery funding, for example, didn't
the production have to adhere to regulations requiring everyone to be paid
at union rates? But hey, let's digress. If this movie was made for anything
close to the figure we're told, the filmmakers have pulled off some kind
of miracle.
The plot of "AKA" involves a working-class teenager
in 1978, played by Matthew Leitch. He wants to go to college. His father
(Geoff Bell) is a large brute of strong words and no compromises; he shouts
frequently, he certainly doesn't want any boy of his going off to fancy learning
centres, and reassurances that he loves the kid are usually followed by secret
bouts of sexual abuse. We're reminded a little of Ray Winstone in "The War
Zone".
Leitch is thrown out of the house. He has heard
of an aristocrat named Lady Gryffoyn (Diana Quick), who dines in the restaurant
where his mother works, and he uses his smarts, good looks and intriguingly
quiet demeanour to get into her life and win employment in her gallery. Soon
he is left to mind her house, and being alone among expensive artefacts gets
his mind racing. He decides to go to Europe, rub shoulders with the Gryffoyns'
society friends, and all the while pose as Lady Gryffoyn's college-age
son.
There is darkness and edge to Leitch's performance
from here, where his character internalises, says only what is required,
attempts to retain a charm based on enigma, changes his accent and worms
his way deeper into upper-crust circles. We are heavily reminded of "The
Talented Mr. Ripley"; the themes of the films are not exactly the same, but
Roy, the writer and director, seems to have used characters and situations
from the other work to figure out a way to drive his story. Explorations
of Leitch's nervous homosexuality are introduced, as well as equivalents
of the Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jack Davenport
characters. What's missing is the killing and the constant threats of being
caught in lies; "AKA" is not about a guy turning psychotic in his determination
to live a better kind of life, but about how he manages to stay steadfast
in his deceit, and how his real identity becomes more of a phantom as time
goes on.
The most interesting and effective thing about
"AKA" is its style. Three square screens are visible at all times, laid out
horizontally across a widescreen canvas. It's not as simple as the plot involving
multiple identities and the film adopting multiple points of view; the experiment
is not a symbolic gimmick, but a way to make the movie an active viewing
experience. The different views show us alternate angles and magnifications,
yes, but they also depict flashbacks, repetitions, playings of other parts
of the scene we're watching. We find ourselves looking from left to right,
unable to take our eyes from the screen. When we are not getting inside
characters' memories or being invited to muse on their ways of looking at
the world, we are simply immersed in the film's reality.
I can spot flaws here, such as the fact that while
Leitch's performance might need to be mysterious to make sense, it doesn't
need to be as inhuman as it is, and at times comes across as flat. Some of
the plotting is confusing, like the credit card cop chasing after Leitch's
debts -- the character's role in the film's emotional content is clear, but
for long stretches I was confused about the literal details of what he was
investigating and how he came into the story. The ending seems unintentionally
two-fold, as if it's damning Leitch's conversion into a cold-hearted snob
and yet admiring the pluck it took to con his way into the high
life.
And yet somehow none of this matters too much.
Even when I should perhaps have been getting impatient or bored, I found
myself fascinated, because the filmmaking of "AKA" is something ingenious.
Mike Figgis's "Timecode" had four screens showing interconnected things happening
in real time, but it was irritating, pointless and incompetent. The story
of "AKA" has imperfections, but the filmmakers clearly care about it and
have not used it as a clothesline for their technique. They draw us in to
a quite unreasonable degree, and the achievement is
impressive.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
Footnote, November 6, 2002: An e-mail from Duncan
Roy informs me that the National Lottery Film Council only got involved during
post-production, meaning the shoot was perfectly entitled to hire people
working on a no-fee basis. Shooting equipment was donated by ArriMedia, through
one of Roy's personal connections who liked the idea for the film. And so
the four-week shoot went ahead on £300,000, with no wages or technical
fees to pay. Still not exactly easy, what with travel, location and prop
costs, but as Roy says, "It can be done, you just don't make any friends
doing it!"
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