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Malvern Hills pastoral, barbed-wire superimposition, scorched hand across the screen. Not "a bit of the old Ludwig van" but a blast of Elgar for the adolescent loner (Spencer Banks), soaring in his room to The Dream of Gerontius until Mum (Georgine Anderson) reminds him it's a bit loud, innit? Nothing but symbols of traditional England for the young reactionary, a vicar's son and aspiring cadet who sneers at the "unnatural" calls for change from the playwright next door (Ian Hogg). Growing pains crack his rigidity, an attraction to the exposed biceps of the milkman (Ron Smerczak) that causes a Fuseli demon to materialize by the edge of his bed. The metaphysics of identity and history, the rude awakening of self-interrogation. "Disobedience, chaos. Out of those alone can some new experiment in human living be born." David Rudkin's teleplay is a recondite bildungsroman visualized by Alan Clarke with sustained intensity, a fusion as radical as Blake. Muddy scrums in the classroom and beaming maidens at the chopping block are among the oneiric flares beneath the skin of normalcy, the blond bully in dream form is a bare torso with a crotch that shoots sparks, cf. Anger's Fireworks. Dad (John Atkinson) holds forth thoughtfully on Manicheism and Joan the witch and Jesus the revolutionary, the lad's hero (Graham Leaman) turns up as a decaying phantom remembering his own embowelling during surgery and confiding in him "the famous tune that fits with my enigma theme." The crushed starling, roadside angels and burnings, Beckett's "rupture" along the church floor. It leads to a proud declaration of the "mixed" self that summons the Last Pagan King himself, the ideal finish for a Pasolini revision of Loach's Kes. "Child, be strange. Dark, true, impure and dissonant. Cherish our flame." With Jennie Heslewood, Geoffrey Staines, and Christopher Douglas.
--- Fernando F. Croce |