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RAY & LIZ, from p.46
site of his second series of photos,
with Jason’s journey.
Billingham isn’t interested in
pretty images, but he does create
striking ones, citing van Gogh and
Degas as infl uences. He uses the
confi ned space of apartments to
create frames within frames. “Ray
& Liz” frequently cuts from disorientingly
extreme close-ups to
establishing shots, in a reverse of
classical fi lm grammar.
When Billingham began taking
photos of his family, his father had
been unemployed for 14 years. He
noted, “Ray is a chronic alcoholic
and has drunk for as long as I
can remember. He has not worked
since he was made redundant from
his job as a machinist around
1980. Liz very rarely drinks but
she does smoke a lot of cigarettes.
My younger brother still does not
seem to know what he wants: he
gets a job for or week or two and
then leaves it.” Billingham got out
of the dead-end existence that his
photos and fi lm depict. The dream
of freedom depicted in the fi nal
third of “Ray & Liz” gives one some
idea how, but here he gives that
freedom to his brother.
“Ray & Liz” seems acutely aware
of its place in British fi lm history
and what it doesn’t want to do. A
strain of neo-neo-realism, exemplifi
ed by Ken Loach’s “I, Daniel
Blake,” is mostly interested in
working-class people as victims of
capitalism and the world as their
obstacle course. Billingham never
suggests any root causes for his
characters’ problems, although it’s
not hard to make a link between his
father’s unemployment and drinking
problem. He’s more interested
in communicating the sensations
of their lives. The scene where Lol
gets drunk is made more grating
by the fact that Jason is constantly
hammering on a toy off-screen.
Throughout it, the fi lm uses sound
design to enhance the ugliness of
its images, which include details
like Lol puking while asleep and
a dog then licking his vomit up. It
dances the tango with miserabilism,
but its world feels genuinely
inhabited, rather than gazed at by
a disinterested voyeur.
Billingham has been thinking
about this material his entire
working life. In 1998, he made a
documentary, “Fishtank,” about
his father. It took fi ve years to produce
“Ray & Liz,” and its fi rst third
initially saw the light of day as a
short in 2016. If his photos have
moved on from his parents — he’s
now depicting his own partner and
their children — the desire to reenact
childhood pain obviously never
left him. But “Ray & Liz” feels oddly
mediated given its personal roots.
The fi lm winds up in a place it may
not have intended: it’s auto-fi ction
that relies on art, made both by
Billingham and others, to fi nd the
keys to his family’s life story.
RAY & LIZ | Directed by Richard
Billingham | KimStim | Opens Jul.
10 | Film Forum, 209 W. Houston
St.; fi lmforum.org
➤ ROJO, from p.46
that he’s a schlubby middle-aged
man, not a cool anti-hero.
“El Movimiento” and “Rojo” show
Naishtat’s talent for building tension
through dialogue. But while
the earlier fi lm built toward violence
in long, talky scenes, “Rojo”
doesn’t offer that grim release.
Claudio spends most of the fi lm
moving in the direction of a confrontation,
but it never happens
the ways we might expect. There
are few moments of innocent pleasure,
which generally involve children
or teenagers. The fi lm cares
more about character development
than narrative buildup.
Naishtat cast actors much older
than himself, who actually lived
through Chile and Argentina’s dictatorships.
Dario Gradinetti is 60,
and his real-life daughter plays
his on-screen daughter. In middle
age, Castro has acted in fi ve fi lms
for Chilean director Pablo Larraín,
playing characters who are
at once dangerous and pathetic,
and brings that baggage to his role
here. In an interview with José Teodoro
for Film Comment last year,
the actor said, “We experienced a
military-civilian dictatorship, not
a military dictatorship… you never
see a single armed politician working
on behalf of the dictatorship
in ‘Tony Manero’ the Larraín fi lm
in which he starred and ‘Rojo.’ In
these fi lms the malignancy is in
➤ ROJO, continued on p.49
GayCityNews.com | July 4 - July 17, 2019 47
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