CINEMA: Justin Pearce
IN Grief, a television production company occupies offices that used to house a brothel, and, as their producer remarks, it’s now a different kind of prostitution that goes on there. Making low-budget daytime television is prostitution in more than one sense though, as much about the displaced gratification of desire as about the selling of body and soul.
Among the ephemera churned out by the studio is a programme called The Love Judge, in which marital infidelities are resolved by means of their sordid details being aired in court. For Grief’s characters, there is no such catharsis — even though producer Jo echoes the soap scripts in her own detective work whereby she attempts to establish exactly who does what to whom on her office sofa after hours. The rest of them remain trapped in their routine of celibacy, experimentation, go-nowhere affairs, and mourning — in fact anything except the deadly certainties of the scripts which they produce. Once again, Jo is the sole exception, who has at last overcome her girth challenge to find true love — even though finding a man who is interested in large women means emigrating to Prague.
There are no heroes in this ark of vignettes, but the action revolves around perhaps the least noticeable of the main characters: the quiet figure of Mark, grieving the death of his lover a year ago. He’s a character in negative, his outline defined by his distance from the manic behaviour of the others. This peculiar arrangement sets the terms for the way the story unfolds without any real possibility of happily-ever-after closure. With Mark stranded on the margins of the plot, his predicament becomes the more moving because of the way it is effectively unchanged by the time the rest of the action has boiled away.
Watching Grief is rather like looking at a clock: you aren’t aware of anything shifting until an hour and a half later when you realise that it has. However, the script is in a completely different class from those written by the characters — filled with bizarre allusions and wry one-liners, it ensures that Grief is a far more interesting experience than watching either a clock or shlock TV.
Grief is showing at the Gay and Lesbian Fim Festival, at the 81/2 Club in Rosebank and the Tram Shed in Pretoria until November