The Red Riding trilogy

“You eat meat with your teeth and you kill things that are better than you are, and in the same respect you say how bad and even killers that your children are. You make your children what they are. I am just a reflection of every one of you.”

- Charles Manson, serial killer, rapist, life-convict.

Everyone loves a good murder mystery, more so when there’s an element of serial-obsession involved in it. Serial killers and compulsive murderers have continuously kept us guessing and contemplating what they’d do next for so long that today, when we watch or read on them, it only feels normal when such characters spawn a set of skills meant to trick, connive and collude even the most challenging adversaries our minds could manifest and challenge them with. It’s true such stories most instantly draw us into a sense of paradox. On one hand, there’s a fervent need for justice in it’s most pulped form, a desire to see a murderer face the combined wrath of what has resulted out of his own horrific actions. On the other, we will the killer to up the level of pathological difficulty for those on his trail. In a way, we don’t want him captured, not yet. Even if what we see is based on incidents that are not entirely fictional, we usually come to the point where storytelling wins over: when the general attitude becomes ego-centric. Of course, being at the receiving end of a medium, watching or reading on such people changes perspectives, but what transpires ultimately is the fact that a disturbed induvidual who is refused to be acknowledged by society as a human at all, most leniently a monster, is now an exotic specimen of intrigue for us to exercise upon him, the dark recesses of our own induvidual personalities.

The Red Riding trilogy is more than everything that’s been described above, and more: a familiar cocktail of whodunit drama, anxiety and frustrating twists in the plot and the most important ingredient of all: the fear of having to blink your eyelids. Based on the quartet of novels written by british author of The Damned United, David Peace (Red Riding In The Year of Our Lord: 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983) and adapted into three screenplays by Tony Grisoni, “Red Riding” is actually supposed to mean the West Riding locality of the provincial town of Yorkshire, UK. It’s a beautiful place with ugly looking buildings, cloudy skies all year round and plenty of sheep running around vast farms on it’s outskirts. David Peace actually based his novels on real-life incidents that happened in and around the little town. Though Tony Grisoni wrote the three screenplays together, three different directors were hired to bring in very distinct filming styles, handling and feel to the three films, generating the impression that the three films had actually been filmed at three separate times. Not that the three directors (Anand Tucker, James Marsh and Julian Jarrold) belong to the cream of the british film fraternity, maybe apart from Marsh, who’s still fresh from directing the Oscar winning documentary, Man on Wire, which still keeps us in the dark as to his capabilities when handling linear-narrative fiction. Not many filmmakers jump between the two sacred, basic genres of modern cinema, maybe giants like Wiener Herzog do, yes. But for others, it’s really not easy.

Talking about genres, I’m not sure and I haven’t had any genuine opportunity to deny this fact, but when it comes to crime-heavy movies depicting serial killers and investigations in pursuit of such criminals in the traditional format, from the point of view of those in pursuit, there haven’t been any good movies out of UK in this department at all. And comparing this fact with that of American films, there lies pure contrast. The only other time British television launched me into the world of serial-crimes, be it in the sixties, or in the modern times, was in the hugely popular tv-series – Life on Mars, which actually got me quite irritated, trying to find a solution to the time-warp paradox, and milking it out of proportions, killing the fun in it completely.

Still, this shouldn’t mean that such incidents are new to this country. And this trilogy pretty much makes up for the void that at least I see here.

Without revealing too much of the plots, the first part,1974 starts with the discovery of a disturbing corpse of a very young girl, who has been found to be bound, tortured, raped, mutilated with bloody engravings on her body and real swan wings stitched to her back. The police immediately jump to damning conclusions and Leonard Cole, an obvoiusly innocent autistic boy is framed and jailed quickly. The sinister silencing-down by the officials appear suspicious. The horrors of the reality soon catches up with amateur journalist Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) who decides to dig deeper, only to discover a huge ring of corruption and cover-ups involving his own chief editor, the local police chiefs, the mother of a victim, a powerful businessman (Sean Bean) and the violence of it all waiting to eat him up.

The second part, 1980 goes behind the notorious real-lief serial killer, the “Yorkshire Ripper”, a dramatisation of the investigations and the ever-looming hand of the corrupt police force. Paddy Considine plays Peter Hunter, partly connected with the events that took place as a bloody culmination of the first movie. He is assigned to bring in a “fresh perspective” to an already prolonged and publicly defamed team of detectives. He’s given all the support he needs, the team members he wants and the voluminous casefiles of the Ripper. Soon, he realises the mistrust and deception lurking within his own department and his own team when the Ripper is “caught”, and cofesses to all but one of the murders in their files, hinting at the possibility of the first of many Copycat Murders, which eventually keep continuing even after the arrest.

Part three plays the role of a redemption prayer to both the first two films. Heavily intertwined with what we see in Part one, 1983 brings back two very quiet characters, Detective Superintendent Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey) and an elusive male prostitute, BJ (Robert Sheehan) both of whom have gathered significant information about local authority figures without coming into much prominence. An otherwise grumpy public-solicitor, John Piggott (Mark Addy) decides to help Leonard Cole, the autistic boy, now in jail.. only to discover a huge ring of paedophililes, operating professionally on a very high level, with his own late father’s name embroiled in the mess. The mental turmoils these people undergo comes a full circle when the last few moments bring such a climax to the trilogy, that the total horror of it all becomes a form of artistic extremism in itself during the final ten minutes of the last movie.

Inspite of being a small production under the Channel 4 banner, and originally being straight, made-for-television films, so much detail has been deployed in the making of this epic, that even the camera-formats used in filming the three parts have their purposes. 1974 and 1980 were filmed in 16mm and 32mm formats respectively, while the final part was shot in standard,modern high definition. Julian Jarrold (1974) uses several closeup shots with deep camera focusing that seemingly blurs-in the foreground into more creepily detail, while James Marsh (1980) tries and minimises excessive colour-editing, unlike the other two. Anand Tucker’s 1983 however ends up looking the best with strong contrast ratios and heavy, smoke-filled, stationary shots. The cloudy skies of Yorkshire (where the trilogy was filmed, using predominantly local crew members) are a perpetual gray, providing a favorable, even light to the cinematography. The yorkshire accents are so thick in places, you’d be grateful for the subtitles in the US-release.

Though the storyline might appear to suit any location, be it yorkshire, London, or even someplace in the US, what makes it necessarily adaptive to only the provincial town of Yorkshire, are in many ways, exclusive..from the public reactions to the horrific incidents, the attitude of the self-righteous, but indigenous press against the police force, the personal isolation felt amidst the community members and the eerie beauty of the landscape that brings in a whole new artistic sense to the horror spewing out of this little county; this is Neo-Noir at its best. Each of the lead characters seemed to fall short of actually becoming “likeable”, as long as their plotlines were in the foreground, the concept of using sex as a means of comfort might baffle some, but the complete absence of sexual tension preceding such passionate episodes of lovemaking is so typical of the elusive genre called Noir, which so few filmmakers seem to have provided. Relationships arise amidst the sense of apparent comfort. Eddie falls in love with a mother whose daughter was a victim, Hunter has a prior history with his partner-detective, and Maurice starts to bond with a sipritual medium, who helps him find the source of the murders, talking through spirits. Still, the directors knew where to draw the line between love and trust. At the point where Maurice seems so sure of whatever the medium (Saskia Reeves) is trying to convey…even we are reduced to blindly trusting some impeding breakthrough where there is absolutely no hope otherwise for those wrongly implicated into life sentences.

The films actually work as standalone masterpieces themselves, though the real ingenuity is seen when watched as a complete set, spanning approximately the entirety of five nail-biting hours. The trilogy isn’t so much about what happens objectively, but about the world in which it takes place, an abyss of greed and evil. The experience is so diverse and immersive, that by the time we watch the final part of the series, we have come across so many characters and complex plot twists, clues and dead ends, that we find ourselves evolved into such a state that we’d suspect even the most unlikely of characters put before us. Everybody could be a suspect, lawmakers, businessmen, doctors, priests, a mentally unstable lad, even the autistic boy in prison.

It’s rare to achieve such an intense level of quality within a single production, and three different directors, which is why some simply choose to ignore theatrical time limits and proceed to make considerably lengthy masterpieces like The Best of Youth, Shoah, Berlin Alexanderplatz and The Lord of the Rings, all involving production budgets of many small countries’ GDP figures put together. But to hardly spark a news-flash (do yourself a favor and don’t watch the cheesy US-release trailers, they’re horrible), with a restricted television-studio budget and a quality supporting cast (Sean Bean, Jim Carter, Warren Clarke, Rebecca Hall and David Morrissey included), Channel 4 has achieved something as spectacular in it’s own right, and the result is there for all the front-row critics to put down their note-taking and sit with their jaws in their laps. Unbelievable.

By Fazil (at PassionForCinema.com)
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This post is an entry to the Reel-Life Bloggers contest organized by wogma.com and reviewgang.com