‘You’ve got a lovely arse.”
“You’ve got a lovely husband.”
Thus a couplet of tart dialogue in the dark drama Clapham Junction, originally a British Channel 4 TV movie and now showing at the Out in Africa (OIA) gay and lesbian film festival in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
In fact, Clapham Junction was commissioned by Channel 4 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain in 19 67. Inevitably the mind flashes back to films such as Victim (19 61), in which Dirk Bogarde was blackmailed by a casual lover, or the post-liberation unease of Sunday Bloody Sunday (19 71), in which sexual mores were shifting and crumbling.
Clapham Junction (written by Kevin Elyot, most famous outside the UK for the play and later film My Night with Reg) starts, more-or-less, with a wedding. A gay wedding, that is: the fact that same-sex couples can marry in the United Kingdom, in a civil union at least, is the most obvious recent sign of progress in the expansion of legal equality.
But, as in South Africa, where we have constitutional protection for “sexual orientation” but women get murdered for being lesbian, the legal code and the situation on the streets don’t coincide.
Weddings are the traditional climax and resolution of the genre of comedy (that is, broadly speaking, narratives with a happy ending), so it’s a warning note that the movie begins with nuptials rather than concludes with them.
Perhaps, as in the old heterosexual joke, that’s why it’s downhill from there on for these people in the middle of today’s London. I suppose that means it is a tragedy, classically speaking, but it’s a damn good one.
Besides, life is filled with ordinary tragedies.
Spiralling out from the inaugural wedding of Clapham Junction are a series of events that entangle the various characters, of whom there are a lot.
There’s the newlywed couple; there’s the hireling one of them chats up at the very nuptials; there’s the youth of 14 spying on a compromised neighbour; there’s the set of heterosexual couples meeting for dinner that very night — and more.
It’s all woven together seamlessly — this half a day and a night and a morning in the fragmented lives of these many, various people, most of them queer in some way.
Rather like a play (and Elyot started as a playwright), it has a unity of time and structure that binds it together and helps build the narrative tension that makes this an extremely gripping movie.
In another way, too, it’s theatrical: it has something of the “problem play” about it, a genre related to the roman à thèse, the novel with a thesis. It’s a bit like Émile Zola investigating and novelising social issues such as prostitution or working-class alcoholism. But it’s none the worse for that. It’s meaty, it’s got wodges and shards of what feels very much like real life in it.
Perhaps an advantage of being a British TV movie is that you don’t have to compete with American cinema product and thus submit to its reigning pieties of both morality and form.
Another advantage, I would imagine, is simply the result of making a lot of really good, serious TV movies, and having a lot of first-class actors around. The film is impeccably staffed at all levels. As the old theatrical adage has it, there are no small roles, only small actors, and these actors do such a good job in large roles and small that it seems unfair to single any one or two out.
The majority of the cast is unknown to me, anyway, but naturally one notices James Wilby and Rupert Graves, who bring with them an echo of an ancestor in the genealogy of gay texts: both were in James Ivory’s adaptation of EM Forster’s Maurice (and Graves was in the Nazi-era homo-drama Bent, too).
It’s rather amusing to imagine Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder, somehow transplanted from the genteelly repressed 19 10s and miraculously aged by only 25 years, cruising each other at a bank of urinals in a public toilet in London in 20 07.
But that’s only a detail in a movie in which all the details, as well as the big stuff, come together with almost merciless precision. The film is set in summer, and anyone whose experienced high summer in London, let alone a heat wave, will know that it can be murderous.
In Clapham Junction (which has more to do with Clapham Common than the titular train station), the characters not actually in an air-conditioned space are constantly a sweat — as the viewer may well be as the dramatic tension builds to a very powerful climax. Take a bottle of water.
There will be free screenings of Clapham Junction at The Bioscope in Johannesburg, on Wednesday October 27 at 9pm, and at the V&A Waterfront Nu Metro in Cape Town, on Wednesday October 27 at 8:15pm and again on Wednesday November 3 at 8:15pm. Tickets for these screenings are only available through Out In Africa and not at cinemas or through any booking service.
To book, contact Lisa by email ([email protected]), giving the name of the film, the date and time of the screening you wish to see, the cinema, the city and the number of tickets required. For full schedules of all OIA screenings, go to www.oia.co.za