Blue Bag Life won the audience award at the 2022 London International Film Festival. As any artist or writer knows, “Who are you?” or “What are you?” can mean different things. We are all different people. Lisa Selby’s passion is filmmaking. She turned the camera on herself and documented her fractured life. Not everything made the cut, but there’s a raw honesty that’s appealing.
‘Disconnection is the only mothering I’ve ever known.’
‘At Primary School my nicknames were “Disease” and “Witch”. I was sure Helen gave me up because of some disease I had…I thought maybe she didn’t want to be called ‘Mum’ cause I was too dirty.’
Helen is Lisa’s mother. She left her when she was ten. Ran away with her lover and her dad brought Lisa up, a single parent. Usually, that’s the kind of thing men are good at.
Helen had six months to live when Lisa tracked her down to a filthy council house in London, where she stayed with her current—and much younger lover—her mother was unrepentant. In her fake furs, including a natty hat, with a can of Special Brew in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she explained it wasn’t really her fault. After Lisa’s birth, she had been sectioned in a psychiatric ward, which made her incapable of being a proper person, never mind a mother. Her love for drugs was stronger than her maternal instinct. She favoured opiates with a smattering of hallucinogenics.
There was always a fag in her mouth, as there was in Lisa’s. Lisa met Elliot, her boyfriend, after attending an AA meeting. A self-proclaimed alcoholic, Elliot had also been addicted to heroin, like her mum.
‘Heroin was Helen’s favourite. Heroin was Elliot’s favourite.’
We know where this is going. ‘I was drawn to the dark things in life. But this was a different kind of dark,’ admits Lisa.
‘I’ve just found out that my mum is in a hospice. She has cancer. They won’t give her chemotherapy because she’s a heroin addict. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I’m filming this. It just makes me feel less alone.’
Who are you? What are you? You decide. If life was only that simple, it could be scripted and the chaos of fucked-up lives reigned in?
This is one of those films I watched which I didn’t really enjoy. For some reason I believed it would be cartoonish. I was thinking of something or somebody else. But it was a conventional film. I’m not sure certain why it was called Three Faces? Perhaps three faces of Iran (I’m not sure what they are either).
I’ll do what I usually do and guess. Two of the Faces would be well known in Iran. Actress Behnaz Jafari plays a version of herself as does film-maker Jafar Panahi. They drive to the rural, Azeri-speaking north west of Iran, where Persian and Turkish is optional.
It’s a step back in time. Jafari and Panahi have left a film set in Teheran (plot) because a young girl Marziyeh Rezaei played by actress Marziyeh Rezaei sent a video message to the former showing her apparent suicide because her family will not allow her to study acting at a drama school in Teheran.
They would lose face and disgrace themselves in the rural village. Their solution is to marry off Marziyeh Rezaei.
Essentially, a road movie involving the medieval concept of the four estates. Ruhollah Khomeini’s clergy have fused with the idea of nobility and taken control of the Iranian state. Commoners, or peasants, in a village with more internet telly than young people, remain largely timeless and idiosyncratic in their patriarchal beliefs. Jafari and Panahi represent the new and transgressive modern film and media, the four estate, which that overlaps with the others and which Rezaei dreams of joining. Over her dead body?
Notes.
misogyny /mĭ-sŏj′ə-nē/
noun
Hatred or mistrust of women.
Hatred of women.
Hatred of women. Contrast misandry.
Gabriel Garcia Marquis Love in the Time of Cholera.
He allowed himself to be swawyed by the conviction that human beings are not born on the day their mother’s give birth to them, but live obliges them again and again to give birth to themselves.
She counted on your compassion. Her phone is switched off.
What if it’s a prank, MrPanahi?
When you want to commit suicide. It’s easy to find a rope and a branch. She thought of everything.
Marihayz has been gone for three days. When she went before. She went to her aunt’s.
My daughter was the most clever. The most gifted. The trouble is she doesn’t know when to shut up. Once she got it into her head to study. I knew it wouldn’t end well. I thought marriage would make her forget. But she imposed her conditions.
No, her family would take everything to save face.
We have a saying in the village: Let a corpse do what it wants and it’ll shit itself.
Who’s Sharzad?
A lady that sang and danced in films before the revolution.
You’re the only one that can help me.
I tried everything.
Couldn’t you have simply asked me?
If I asked you…If I’d told the truth…Would you have come?
The bull. He’s suffering. But it’s not up to you or me to intervene. That’s God’s will. He’s the bull with the golden balls. [stud bull]
She must resent us for not supporting her.
The place is tiny. She’s got nothing in the house. Just her paintings. And posters of her films.
Ayoub’s foreskin. The gentleman can’t go abroad. He can’t come here (Iran).
It has powers, I tell you.
This is a village. People gossip If he (her brother) knows she’s at Sharzad’s house he’ll burn it down.
Scrublands begins with a bang. Literally. Father Byron Swift (Jay Ryan) after mass at St Michael’s church in the fictitious dust-riven farming town of Riversend brings not words of peace and thanksgiving but a telescopic rifle out of the sacristy. He kills five male parishioners. This isn’t America where such atrocities seem to happen every day, with the gun lobby arguing more and better kinds of guns are needed, and the former moron’s moron President arguing kindergarten teachers should be armed, but New South Wales. The drought continues, but when the dust dies down a simple explanation offers a kind of closure. The much admired, even loved, Father Byron Swift couldn’t keep his cock in his pants and was screwing parishioners’ kids.
Award winning journalist Martin Scarsden (Luke Arnold) is sent to do a kind of fluff piece on how the townsfolk are coping one year after the shooting. But he’s shunned by the townsfolk. Some are more antagonistic than others. The local cop, Constable Robbie Haus-Jones (Adam Zwar) feted as a hero for bringing down and killing the paedophilic mass shooter, modestly says he was just doing his job. Local beauty and bookshop owner, Mandy Bond (Bella Heathcote), seems ready to speak out, but then bites her pretty bottom lip.
No great surprise that charismatic priest and local beauty equal Thorn Birds territory. Scarsden has to hang about because (a) his shitty car hire breaks down and a bumpy, out of town road where he doesn’t know where he’s going. (b) he finds two bodies that have been missing since Christmas and nobody else could find. In the latter, but not the former we are in Scooby Doo territory. (I’d have got away with it if it wasn’t for those damn kids or award-winning journalist suffering for PTSD) All writers enter Scooby Doo territory at some point. I like to get in early and set up basecamp.
Back in basecamp, we’re in explaining the backstory. Only the worst kind of Trumpet accepts the simple shooting theory. Holden Caulfield the protagonist in Catcher in the Rye, explains much better than me how backstory works.
‘If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap.’
Caulfield is the kinda cynical kid Father Byron Swift knew too well as does journalist, Scarsden. One of the many questions Scrublands asks is whether it is truly possible to begin live anew. Change, really change and become someone else. Worship God as you understand him. Scrublands even takes a tilt at QAnon (‘PizzaGate’) conspiracy thinking and the followers of the moron’s moron, which is always good, while holding out a more adult explanation of what happened, which isn’t convincing. But as any writer knows A and B doesn’t need to equal C. It just needs to feel like it does. Worth watching.
Holocaust literature regularly tops the bestselling lists. Yet the story of Nadine Hwang, the daughter of the Chinese ambassador to Spain, who fell in love with opera singer Nelly Mousset Vos on Christmas day, 1944, in Ravensbruck, a Nazi’s women’s concentration camp, couldn’t find a publisher. Siemens operated a factory from its premises. A perfect competition model of a free-enterprise zone. No rules or regulations. Labour was provided by mastermind of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler and the SS at minimal cost paid directly to his agency staff. The SS guards provided accommodation, a uniform and food. Babies were placed head to toe in the Kinderzimmer in Block 11 and starved to death. The sunniest place was behind the delousing block. By the end of 1944, Ravensbruck was so overcrowded, women arrived dressed in straw and there was nowhere to put them. Little or nothing to eat.
With the war ending, and the Allies closing in, inmates in Ravenbruck were moved to other camps. For many this meant a Death March. Nelly Mousset Vos was packed into a cattle truck in which 17 died. She was taken to another concentration camp in Austria, Mauthausen. She counted the stone steps carved out of rock she had to walk up, and so many prisoners were thrown down to their deaths. Unloading a train, she heard the click of the guard’s gun as he prepared to shoot her, because she couldn’t go on, but did. She survived and was liberated and taken to Malmo in Sweden to recuperate by the Red Cross.
Nelly & Nadine set up home in Caracas in Venezuela. Nelly left behind her two children in France. Both women died in 1972. Their story is framed by Nelly’s diaries and Super-8 films of her exile in Caracas ex-pat and gay community, she bequeathed to her granddaughter, Sylvie Blanchi.
‘Without a boat you’ll lose your way,’ a fisherman friend warns Jesmark (Jesmark Scicluna).
Jesmark fishes the same inshore Maltese waters in his 12-foot Luzzu that his father and grandfather before him fished. It’s not a job, but an identity. His boat, which was his father’s father’s boat before him, needs work. But he can’t afford to pay for it. His forefathers made a living from the sea, but he’s been squeezed on every side and his young wife Denise (Michela Farrugia) also works in a café to support them.
‘One of us needs a good job,’ she tells him.
‘I’ll take care of us,’ he promises.
But their baby is failing to put on the required amount of weight. Everything is so expensive. The EEC is also offering a grant to fisherman like him to scrap his boat and give up his permit. Superb.
‘I’m not disabled, I’m blind able,’ said Jesse Dufton, the first blind man to climb the 440- foot sea stack the Old Man of Hoy in Orkney on the 4th June 2019.
A consultant’s diagnosis that you are going to be blind is akin to a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Of all our senses, sight is the most precious. Given a choice (we don’t get a choice, it’s more like fate) I’d take the terminal cancer rather than suffer blindness. Most of us would. Sight is associated with light. It helps regulate our appetites and hormones. Our body clock relies on sight and light, each cell in our body responds to light.
Dufton was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa when he was four-years old. His parents were told he would never be able to read. They should shelter him and prepare him for a life of blindness. They did the opposite and sent him to the school of hard knocks.
Molly, his visual climbing guide and fiancée, met him at university. He was part of their climbing club. She thought there was something strange about him. Later she worked out he was blind. He had only peripheral vision, which was also deteriorating. By the time Dufton was twenty, he could no longer hold a page up to his nose and read the print. Aged thirty, his field of vision was around 1-2%. He was blind by any measure.
The Old Man of Hoy is an arduous climb for the sighted. That old equation, time, speed and distance are also related to sight. When swimming breath stroke with my eyes shut in the baths I tend to hit the guide ropes, panic and open my eyes. Everything seems further away, yet nearer. Einstein’s special theory of relativity could also apply to blindness. Moving clocks run slow. Rulers shrink. Our impotence grows. Nothing seems possible. If the population of Scotland were blinded and taken scale the Old Man of Hoy all would fall off like lemmings from the cliff face onto the rocks and sea below.
We know Jess Duffon made the impossible possible plotting a path for other blind and unsighted people. The complex machinery of our eyes are made up of four separate strata. He believes he will regain his vision. I’m not so sure. It’s not about pluck or determination or even luck. His fate is out of his hands. He has faith of a different sort. I hope his story has a happy ending, because it would mean so much to so many others. But I imagine whatever happens, his superpowers of resilience won’t let him down. What would you fear losing most?
I’m a fan of Storyville. There have been lots of documentaries on recently to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, 27th January. The date is chosen to mark the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. There are two stories here which wind around three minutes of film, but which takes over sixty minutes to tell.
The first story is quite simple. How a piece of film celluloid was saved by Glen Kurtz (he’s listed as a writer) before it degraded and the images on it were lost. Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum were able use the latest technology to recreate frame by frame footage taken by David Kurtz of the Jewish community of Nasielsk, Poland in 1938.
A river separated Nasielsk from Soviet Russia, when Hitler and Stalin made a pact which divided up the Polish territory. 7000 residents,3000 of which were Jewish. Around 100 Jews survived the war when the Nazi came. The people on the film are dead. Identifying them and telling their stories is an act of homage and remembrance.
It also make nonsensical Poland’s nationalist government’s attempts to criminalise those that tell a story of Polish people helping the Nazis to murder, rape, torture and steal from Jewish victims of genocide. Here it was shown to the lie it is. Those in the film had ten minutes to assemble in the cobbled town square. Stripped naked and robbed. Whipped while they were marched to the synagogue where they were locked inside without water or food. Then they were put into cattle trucks and sent to their death. This was all done without Nazi help. The Holocaust was a team effort. The Poles player their part. Rewriting history is what winner do. Three minutes of footage stands as testament to different kinds of lies in different eras.
One Jewish resident of Nasielsk recounted how he’d saved his girlfriend from the Synagogue by borrowing the hat of a sympathetic German officer. Turning up and telling the guards on the door (fellow citizens) that he was here to arrest his girlfriend. She too didn’t recognise him until they were unsafely away. Both made it across the river to the Soviet side and survived the war. Around six million Jews didn’t. Their stories remain untold.
I listened and was intrigued by The Battersea Poltergeist. Danny Robbins has assembled the same team to tackle another caseload, he terms ‘the most haunted house in Britain’. He’s repeating himself. But I wouldn’t want to stay within spitting distance. Or to put it another way, no way would I stay anywhere near that place. I’m not sure if I believe in ghosts. And yes I am a scaredy-cat. I used to read all those kinds of books when I was younger, Colin Wilson and The Occult, Outsiders and all that stuff. I guess we grow out of it.
Like most people I’ve had that hairs-on-the-back-of-your head feeling of something being there. That’s when I scarper. You’ll not get me investigating strange noises in the basement or attic. I’m curious, but I’ll let someone else do the legwork. Danny Robins does a great job. Empiricism is based on the null-hypothesis. Not proving something right. But attacking and nullifying that belief. Last man, or ghostly presence, standing.
I was about twenty when I stayed in an old church hall overnight. There was about four of us. We slept upstairs and before we went to sleep we heard the unmistakable sound of somebody clomping up the stairs. I pulled open the door. And, you’ve probably guessed, nobody there. This happened a few times. I heard it and the people with me also heard it. We were scared, but we were also tired. I fell asleep. I guess they did too. We got used to the idea. We moved on the next morning.
Notes.
Dare you visit Britain’s most haunted house? Joseph Fiennes and Alexandra Roach star in a new paranormal cold case from Danny Robins, creator of The Battersea Poltergeist.
Episode 1 & 2.
It’s 1989, rural Wales, a lonely old farmhouse in the shadow of the imposing Brecon Beacons mountains. Young, pregnant Liz Rich and her artist husband Bill rent an isolated farmhouse in the Welsh countryside, with Bill’s teenage son Laurence. They’re hoping for a fresh start, but the house holds dark secrets, and the family’s new life becomes a terrifying ordeal that will change them forever.
Their dream home has become a haunted nightmare – but what is real and what is in their minds?
Written and presented by Danny Robins, creator of The Battersea Poltergeist, Uncanny and West End hit 2:22 – A Ghost Story, The Witch Farm stars Joseph Fiennes (The Handmaid’s Tale) and Alexandra Roach (No Offence), with original theme music by Mercury Prize-nominated Gwenno. This 8-part series interweaves a terrifying supernatural thriller set in the wild Welsh countryside with a fascinating modern-day investigation into the real-life mystery behind what has been called Britain’s most haunted house.
Cast:
Bill Rich ….. Joseph Fiennes
Liz Rich ….. Alexandra Roach
Wyn Thomas ….. Owen Teale
Lawrence Rich ….. Jonathan Case
Electrician ….. Delme Thomas
Written and presented by Danny Robins
Experts: Ciaran O’Keeffe and Evelyn Hollow
Sound design by Charlie Brandon-King and Richard Fox
Music by Evelyn Sykes
Theme Music by Gwenno
Researcher: Nancy Bottomley
Produced by Danny Robins and Simon Barnard
Directed by Simon Barnard
Consultant was Mark Chadbourn, author of the book on the case, Testimony
Bill artist. Liz, Welsh, 3 months pregnant. Bill’ s son, Lawrence 14 from his first marriage.
Man behind the trees, watching.
Thomas, I Wind. I own the next farm along. I wouldn’t
Highest of Brecon Becons.
Exoricism, No one works out what’s going on. Early phenomenon. Autumn 1989. Birth of Ben. November 1989.
Someone was here, Liz. I heard it.
First electric bill. £750 for quarter. It should be £100?
Ben asleep.
We heard the door slam, but it never moved.
Paranormal experts. Experts: Ciaran O’Keeffe and Evelyn Hollow
The house feels like a Rubic’s cube. History and mythology so dense. Witchcraft.
Kieran, skeptic. Appertions to possession.
Bill, only one to hear. Routine. Dream state.
Next day, Liz. Phantom door banging.
Electrical >not unusual. Haunted environment not unusual.
Entire family hear footsteps. Another sound. Sulfur smell. Manifest regularly. Another smell. Incense. Something links?
Electricity whizzing. Marker.
Checked by electricity board. You’re going to have to pay bill?
Power surges when intense.
5 times the amount.
Baseline: 1 hour of his washing machine. 31 200 hours. How do you generate that much electricity?
£750 around £8000 today.
Paranormal interfere with electromagnetic field.
November to December.
Bill goes for walk with baby Ben. Gravestone. Used them to build. Your house. Your house is built with gravestones.
Liz. I was terrified.
It was the most disgusting thing I ever came across. It was evil.
Danny meets our star witness – the real-life Liz Rich, to learn more about the frightening reality of living inside what has been called Britain’s most haunted house. Back in 1989, we hear how the haunting intensifies, as Bill and Liz feel a sinister presence that appears to be taking over their lives, but is it real, or is it in their heads?
Episode 2. The Watcher.
The Witch Farm reinvestigates a real-life haunting – a paranormal cold case that has been unsolved for nearly 30 years – until now. Set in in the beautiful, remote Welsh countryside, this terrifying true story is told through a thrilling blend of drama and documentary.
I’m watching you, you feel scared.
People often say, I want to live in a haunted house. You bloody well, wouldn’t.
Timeline. One big development. Something that happened in the wake of the first phenomena, the footsteps and smells. Bill and Liz hardly dared talk about.
December 1989, kitchen.
I feel it. You’re being watched.
A (brooding) presence in the house.
Footsteps (i) hard boots (ii) slipper? Shuffling along landing and down the stairs.
Significant temperature changes. Unbearable heat. Brutal cold. Localised. This room. The area around the electricity meter.
Focal point. Power surges coinciding with phenomena.
Electricity supplier: Numerous tests. We are quite satisfied and have never experienced anything like this before.
Desecrated gravestones?
Liz, now in her sixties. You’ve got photos? This was the happier stuff. Something missing. No photos of Heol Fanog.
I burnt them. I bloody burnt them all. I wanted no memory of that bloody place. I wasn’t bringing it with me.
Before you met Bill? What was young Liz like?
Bloody hell, you wouldn’t have wanted to know me. I was wild. I went to live in Ibiza, Morocco. Took a motorbike through the Sahara. I’ve got a wild streak and I adore things that are new and exciting.
Did Bill fall into that category?
He was stunning looking. Very gentle. Very kind and very intelligent. I was attracted to him because he was quite weird, I think. Artists are interesting. They’re just different.
So you want to build this life together?
You and Bill and your son Lawrence and this baby and you find this place? It feels as if you fall in love with the house as well?
It was so bloody gorgeous. All in its own grounds. Stuck at the foot of the mountain.
Nearest neighbours half a mile down the hill.
I always wanted to get animals as well. So it was perfect. Even with a barn (and pig?)
But then Liz, there’s a point where it stops being fun?
Yeh.
So we’ve heard how the phenomenon starts. This becomes pretty much a daily occurrence?
Oh, this became normal. And they’re not gentle footsteps. No one’s creeping around. They are loud. They want to be heard. It kept getting braver, whatever it was.
It wasn’t tangible. That’s the scary bit.
Paradise is quite a different place. How does it feel now?
Frightened. It was as if it was playing. Playing with us. Like cat with a mouse.
Experts: Ciaran O’Keeffe and Evelyn Hollow
Evelyn: I found her such an interesting character. Originally, I was concerned she was a person who was just predisposed to being afraid. She had so much stress in her life. But when you actually dig into Liz and her background, I couldn’t believe a woman who had…was readily afraid of some noises in the house.
I’ve spent a lot of time with Liz. And one thing she is not is a scaredy-cat.
She has lived through a level of fear most of us have never experienced?
Ciaran: Absolutely, thing of the environment. Where they are. Brecon Beacons and so isolated. But they are also what they perceive to be a dangerous situation. They are having this experience, while almost being trapped by the environment. I think it would be difficult for almost anybody to be in that situation and not show some level of fear.
Let’s discuss our new phenomena? This sense of presence is so interesting. But as Liz said, that is ‘intangible’.
What’s tangible is these new temperature swings and those smells. Sulphur and incense.
Evelyn: Yeh, it’s fairly common in most hauntings, people would report sudden plunges in temperature. But the intense heat it interesting. It feeds into the idea there are polar opposites at play in the house, because we’ve had sulphur and incense…It starts to feel that there are more than one personality at play within the house.
That’s fascinating, because we also have two sets of footsteps: the booted ones and the ones in slippers.
Evelyn is suggesting there are almost two personalities, but there are also to human personalities, Bill and Liz? Do you feel we need to look at how their responses are affecting each other?
Ciaran: Yeh. There’s the psychological concept called contagion. And contagion is where somebody has an experience and you have an empathetic experience just because you are close to them. Going back to human evolution, if somebody next to you is feeling fear for a genuine reason, it’s no surprise that you too experience that fear. Because ultimately that could be lifesaving.
So you’re still saying that they could be imagining this? But, surely, they can’t imagine a smell?
Ciaran: Well, there’s this lovely term, one of my favourite words in parapsychology, ‘phantasmial’, (?) It basically means, smelling things that aren’t there. We know there are particular triggers in the brain. It could be brain injury. But also if you are somebody that’s going through absolute extremes. So you’re going through extreme stress. Extreme sleep deprivation. You can also be affected by phantomial.
A detective story? This isolated house and its cast of suspects. One thing we know for sure, is not imagined is that enormous electricity bill. We did our experiment. How impossible that seemed to be and yet…? The electricity board are insisting that Bill and Liz pay it.
Bill had been an artist. Then his work dries up, seemingly overnight?
Liz: Oh, god, it was a nightmare. He was just going down to a darker hole by the minute. It just seemed that whatever way he went. No, no, nothing.
Suddenly you find yourself in a pretty dramatic financial situation?
Liz: It was bleak. Bloody bleak.
And as you all know, just when you think things can’t get any worse. They normally do.
Liz: Lucinda, the pig went mad. She became crazed. Crazy. You get to the point where you think this thing is going to break into the house and go for you. And I was very frightened of her…It went on for five or six weeks.
But she’d been an almost gentle pet?
Liz: Yeh, you could have lain on the floor with her. Tickle its tummy. And to go from that to this…creature that was very dangerous. We had to call for help.
…within a few weeks, all our animals had gone crazy or died. A pig died. Two cats died. A guinea pig died. A dog died. And a herd of goats, which I actually had six. Died.
This bizarre plague of madness spread to all the animals we had.
Liz, this is not normal. If this was an illness, you wouldn’t normally see it spread species to species? This weird?
Yeh.
Suddenly your paradise, your private little farm feels like something else, entirely.
Liz: There was no happiness in there anymore. It was a hellhole. Absolute hellhole.
Evelyn, we can see the impact this is having on Liz and Bill, but do we really think this thing in the house, the watcher, could be impacting on Bill’s work and the animals?
Evelyn: Here’s the thing. When you are afraid, and things start to mount up, it can feel like you are cursed. And we readily explain that away it is stress. It is tiredness. It is fear. But just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean things aren’t out to get you.
And there’s something else we need to talk about. An elephant in this room when we use that word, cursed, what we know about the history of this area, where Heol Fanog is.
Evelyn: One of the things that jumps out is the whole area is densely populated by stories of witchcraft. And when we do start delving into it we do find stories of witchcraft and famine and animals being born deformed. Horrible things happening to livestock. Your also seeing the area around Brecon has almost 40 planes coming down over it. I think basically it’s been described as a plane graveyard. And you’ve also had things like soldiers dying bizarrely in training exercises. The are around Brecon itself has this reputation for feeling cursed. There is this ongoing believe that all of the causes for this bad luck and range of events is because it was such a hotbed for witchcraft. Is it the case that Bill and Liz have inherited these phenomena? House and land they are on is cursed?
Ciaran: I think this is a classical case of cognitive dissonance. Where if you believe something is happening, anything that supports that theory you listen to or take on board. Anything that refutes or goes against that belief you completely ignore.
We’re focussing on animal deaths. There are animals were nothing happens to them. We’re focussing on this loss of income. But there’s one really important thing that we mustn’t forget. And that’ s what happened in the early 90s. There was a recession. People were watching what they were buying. And businesses were going under. And people would not have been spending money on luxury objects like works of art.
Liz: The toilet. It actually came up from the floor. And the tiles beneath it rose up. It was almost as if there was something underneath it. Shoving it upward.
So you call a plumber?
[re-enactment drama] Plumber. It’s all fine. Everything in working order.
You think we’ve all imagined this?
Liz: Yeh, but after the plumber left, give or take half an hour. The tiles had pushed itself up from the toilet again. So I called the plumber back. But as soon as he goes over and goes in, it’s fine.
Plumber: I’ve been here before and something happened. 20 odd years ago, the owner booked me to install a central heating system here. Big job. Radiators in every room. I had this boy with me, apprentice. One day I had to nip down to Brecon to get something. Said I’d have to leave the kid on his own. He refused, point blank. Said he’d rather lose the job, than stay alone.
I asked him why?
He said he felt someone was always watching him.
Normally, I’d tell him to get a grip. But he was bloody scared. I could see it on his face. And I recognised that look—today. On your faces. So is something here?
Liz: I don’t know.
Hang on, I haven’t finished. After I done the job, I got a phone call from the owner, Mrs Holborn. I rush up in the van and she shows me. All the radiators had come off the wall. Every single one. Now, I’m a professional. Make sure I do a good job. I have no idea how it happened. But I go around and check them all. Double check. Triple check. Every room. Next day she calls me. It’s happened again.
How?
Now, my first thought was is she doing it? But why would she? And even if she was, I’m not sure she’d have the strength. Anyway, I put them back on and I’m thinking about my apprentice. And I’m starting to feel a bit funny. Thinking, if there is something here, watching. Did it do this?
Did it ever happen again?
Night after night, she’d find the radiators wrenched off the wall. I still don’t know if I believe in ghosts. But you’re not imagining things. There is something here.
Liz, this is the corroboration we were looking for. Other people have been experiencing these things here too. On one level this is reassuring, you are not going mad. But it also means something else too. This is real.
Liz: Yeh, if you have reality in front of you. You have to face it. You think of everything it’s done so far and you think, what’s next? Are we safe? Are our kids, safe?
[postscript] Evelyn: Apparitions are incredibly rare. There is no longer something in the house, but some one.
There’s an old trick for a director to add a few lines of text and also claim credit as a writer. Harriet is about slavery. Black people were bought and sold like slaves (and still are). You’ve probably had a mental blip, because it’s clichéd. From Prince claiming he was a slave and changing his name to a squiggle during a contractual dispute with his record company. In contrast, Liz Truss being a slave to the market. Black Lives Matter means the opposite. Abraham Lincoln theoretically freed the slaves (apart from his own), but we’ve had Jim Crow laws, Emmit Till, the Vietnam War and the return of the Republican racist righteous Proud Boys to the Presidency.
Harriet Tubman (Cynthia Erivo) takes us back to her roots. The use of her first name singular suggests we are already familiar with the outline of her story. I wasn’t.
She is portrayed as a black Joan of Arc. A God-given strength to her mission. To free herself from slavery. Die or try. For most other blacks it was try and die. She reached freedom. One hundred miles of unforgiving territory stalked by slave catchers and dogs. Even blacks that sold their own kind and sent them back to their white masters. They’d probably vote for the moron’s moron, Trump. Later it was 400 miles to Canada, even with The Underground Railroad, too far and too few. But the small still voice in her head tells her where to go and when. She has fits. They are portrayed here as playbacks or play forwards of scenes from her life. These are linked to a blow she took on her head. For those of a scientific mind, the aura before epilepsy. For others, quite simply, miraculous. With God on her side, Harriet showed no fear. Slavery was against God’s law. It was all there in black and white played out in the American Civil War. Harriet, a black woman, who also led black troops into battle. It’s to step out of time. Two steps forward and two step back. Worth a look.
Leila Slimani brings to the screen her international bestselling novel Lullaby, directed by Lucie Borleteau. Another case of preferring the film to the novel. I read about half the book, or more, before I stopped reading.
I knew what was going to happen and didn’t particularly like any of the characters. I’ve nothing against books about nannies. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is a classic, none of which of its multiple adaptations as screenplays match the written word, but they remain entertaining. We even get Orson Welles as a gruff Rochester.
Lullaby a simple enough story, an affluent middle-class Parisian couple, hire a nanny, Mila (Assya Da Silva) to take care of their little girl, Sylvie (Noelle Renaude) and little boy, Adam (Calypso Peretjatko [nine months] and Benjamin Patissier [fifteen months]).
Paul (Antoine Reinartz) is a successful music producer. His beautiful wife, Wafa (Rehab Mehal) doesn’t need to work. They’ve got enough money to live on, but she wants to go back to work and kick-start her career. They agree to look for a nanny. To try out a new way of living. If it doesn’t work they can go back to the way it was.
Wafa is a successful, highly educated Parisian, but she’s also regarded as Algerian. Low-paid drudge work is done largely by the immigrant population. An agency boss belittles Algerian nannies and coloured nannies in general. The usual slightly racist stuff about being lazy and late and not being properly French. This makes Wafa uncomfortable.
They are not sure they’ll find a nanny—they can afford. Wafa interviews a few candidates. Mila is the dream candidate. And she’s white.
She wins the job and the kids love her. Their parents like her too. She does everything for them. Not only taking care of the kids but housekeeping and making them healthy meals and snacks when they finish work.
Like me, you’ve probably figured how this is going to go. There’s a slightly loopy bit in Jane Eyre where she runs away into the English wildness, almost marries another man, but keeps her morals and becomes the nineteenth-century equivalent of a millionaire. She hears Rochester’s voice calling to her.
Lullaby doesn’t end with a lullaby. Read the book or watch the film.
odonnellgrunting 