Monthly Archives: October 2025

Radio On (1979)

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Director Christopher Petit with David Beames

I thought about “radio off” partway through, but I persevered. It’s got to be a cult film for a reason, I reasoned. An English road movie – all the way from London to Bristol! – with a great soundtrack.

An odd, disaffected film that made me think of J G Ballard and Michelangelo Antonioni. Was there a plot? It was partly financed by the German film industry, and it shared that bleakness and gloom that put me off German films forty years ago. 1979 rushed back to me, but this time I experienced it from the eyrie of age. What happened to all that postwar optimism and rebuilding? How did it turn into this alienating, emotionally stunted world, shot in inky B&W, stripped bare – not of luxuries (for simplicity would be preferable), but of essentials? Where is friendliness, love, interaction, nature, warmth, beauty? It was all concrete and tarmac rather than softness, hostility rather than kindliness, hard core pornography rather than love, screens rather than real life. Potential emotional cores – his brother’s suicide, the German woman looking for her little daughter – were perfunctory. (The little girl now spoke a different language to her mother: intimacy was always fragile.) The acting was minimal, devoid of feeling unless it was anger or irritation. What was the point of it all? What was the director trying to convey? Anything at all? Was it just self-referentially “cinematic”?

I’m still not sure about that, but it definitely had the feel of its time. The camera lingered on things that I had gazed at myself: peeling paint, pylons, petrol pumps. I had forgotten how big women’s hair was in the late 70s and how voluminous their clothes until the two German women appeared. The feel of driving a car – something I did only at that period of my life – or just travelling in a car came back to me with all those shots through the windscreen. The underlying violence of the period – Northern Ireland always in the news, terrorism on the Continent. A film of impressions.

Dead of Winter

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Director Brian Kirk with Emma Thompson

With the weather and my aches, I was getting cabin fever so an evening at the cinema appealed. This film fitted the bill: I was engrossed while watching it (although cavilling at the over-sentimental flashbacks) and happily picked it to pieces on the way home. Emma Thompson is great as a kind, grieving widow who unleashes her inner Rambo when she discovers a dreadful crime. The winter landscape is perfect for the action: a shoot-out between the Wicked Witch and the Fairy Godmother to keep Snow White. It’s pretty ludicrous – but I wasn’t bothered by that.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

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I feel as if I should be writing an essay on the themes of this novel, its recurring images, its modernism and streams of consciousness that lead to a great sea of life – and then hand it in to be marked. But no – I shall just note what struck me on my first reading.

I’ve never read Ulysses (and have no inclination to), but I assume there are similarities. Is it telling that there is no great legendary female voyager to represent Mrs Dalloway? Her geographical range is narrow – Central London and somewhere in the country – but her temporal range is from girlhood to her current age. There were echoes of The Wasteland too – shell-shocked Septimus and I had not thought death had undone so many, the bells that keep the hours.

Women/girls and flowers/the natural world. We first meet Mrs Dalloway as she sets off to buy some flowers (cut, already picked) for that night’s party; her daughter is now of an age where men see her as a flower to be plucked:

She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was like a hyacinth, Willie Titcomb was thinking . . .

I found myself very taken by the attempts to encompass everything of a person’s thoughts: the constant flowing between youth and middle age in one’s head while clocks strike the hours:

For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, ‘This is what I have made of it! This!’ And what had she made of it?

So many characters whose lives briefly touch. Septimus and his suffering Italian wife. The repellent and conflicted – but also suffering – Miss Kilman. Their lives appear dreadful against the worldly comforts of the Dalloways and their friends. Reticence: Mr Dalloway intends to tell his wife that he loves her, but he passes up the opportunity to yet, involuntarily, he tells his daughter how lovely she is. Age brings with it complications that we are only dimly aware of.

Perhaps Sally’s final words are the ones to be heeded: “What does the brain matter . . . compared with the heart?”

Just brilliant.

The Green Ray (1986)

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Director Éric Rohmer with Marie Rivière

A film that was by turns boring, intriguing, excruciating and very French. “Excruciating” because it reminded you of how awful being young can be – uncertainty, boredom, dissatisfaction, the feeling that things should be progressing along a certain path but aren’t. Delphine’s summer holiday plans are disrupted at the final moment and she has to find somewhere else to go instead. Her engagement has ended and her friends nag her to find someone else. She tries Cherbourg, the Alps and Biarritz and is disconsolate in all those places. Finally there is what seems to be a fairy-tale ending – engineered by Delphine’s moment of decision combined with her “personal superstition”.

It was a film of observation: there was no analysis or judgment. Delphine is often in tears and her well-meaning friends describe her as depressed, but it’s presented as part of life. The film was semi-improvised – sometimes jarringly so, when characters seemed to be responding to an interviewer rather than just talking. Delphine had three or four major speeches when she tried to explain herself – her vegetarianism, her sense of not fitting in, and her refusal to accept one-night stands in place of romance. These – along with the pick-up scene – made the film feel quite different, its diffuse feeling suddenly coming into focus.