Gabriel Ogier paid for his ticket, the server held up his note to the light. He'd given enough money for standard, he sat in a premier seat. Locke was a one man car phone nightmare. The protagonist takes a continuous motorway ride to witness the birth of his illegitimate child. In the process he reassures, argues with the non-visible, destroying his home-life, his work. Or are they actual beings that he is talking to? Gabriel felt trapped in the cinematic vehicle, confined to this solitary man's traumas without escape. It was a pretty intense journey.He walked out of the cinema at the end, wandering across the street to the squat gymnasium. Inside he took a seat on the floor. The live music began. Spanish blues harmonicas, northern howlers, too much reverb, hooded guys protesting with songs, chirpy munchkins. Been round the block beat-boxing, wooden microphone stand, funk backing group with Yamaha keys. Endless rapped readings and improvisations taken from blurred pen-marked notebooks, audience and performers, the same, connected. An unknown what next, freedom and openness, with some danger and edge. He danced with his friends, the two long dark-haired women, to the makeshift, booming speakers, blurting heavy, sweet reggae.
D and H are an artistic couple, who's lives are shaped by their architectural house. They ponder, work in an experimental manner, have sex, spurn others, luxuriate in empty real time. Creative, non-actors Liam Gillick and Viv Albertine give brave, unaffected performances. Both, in unison, dowdy and erotic, analytical and mundane, we feel these people have been captured unaware. This is Joanna Hogg's best film so far, it's disarming, mysterious yet often amusing, she never takes obvious turns in plot and avoids yielding to conventional characterisation, shot with contained flair.
Network is a seething, passionate satire on the television industry from 1976 which was regarded as a brilliant, paranoid exaggeration at the time but has come to be seen as a dark oracle into our aggressively banal current state at the hands of media manipulation and programming. Dave Itzkoff's clear-sighted, thoroughly researched book has a hero in Network's writer Paddy Chayefsky. A difficult, conflicted man who's outspoken views could not fit into any tidy ideology or rhetoric, he was a non-conformist in his cynicism, had his own vision of truth but was afraid of youthful changes or leftist reform.