DIR: Neil Jordan • WRI: Neil Jordan • PROD: Stephen Woolley • DOP: Ian Wilson • ED: Kant Pan • DES: Jim Clay • CAST: Forest Whitaker, Miranda Richardson, Stephen Rea, Jaye Davidson, Adrian Dunbar, Breffini McKenna.
Looking as cool and unfazed as he seemed when his first book, Night In Tunisia, was published and acclaimed in the 1970s, Neil Jordan stood on the stage of the Cork Opera House and faced an audience eager to watch his new film. The Crying Game was the opening-night choice at the thirty-seventh Cork Film Festival.
Arriving at the microphone after the official speakers, Jordan (who was accompanied by the actor Stephen Rea) had a slightly crumpled air. He said little but his words should serve as a warning to anyone who might over-analyse his latest work: 'It's a simple little movie,' he said. 'It's not particularly designed to make you feel good in yourself. That seems to be my function in life.' The sense of discomfort was certainly felt by many of those who saw the film. It was not, however, the discomfort of boredom or the discomfort that arises when one feel that one has been conned. Rather, it was the discomfort one encounters all too rarely before certain films, books and paintings which edge their way beneath our pre-conceptions and leave us uneasy and unsettled with our certainties shunted away.
The story is easily told, Jody, a black British soldier (played by Forest Whitaker), is lured by Jude (Miranda Richardson) into an IRA trap. He is held hostage in a glasshouse by an IRA gang. A friendship develops between him and one of the gang. Fergus (Stephen Rea). The soldier tells him about Dil, a woman in London. The soldier is killed, as are some members of the gang.
Fergus escapes to London and works as a builder's labourer. Drinking in a bar called The Metro, he meets Dil (Jaye Davidson) and a relationship develops. Their friendship is haunted by memories of the dead Jody. A series of extraordinary revelations is made. The IRA track Fergus down and draw him into renewed activity with a plan to shoot a judge. The relationship between Dil and Fergus intensifies. The film culminates in a shoot-out and a prison scene. As an aside, it is worth mentioning that the story of the film cannot be told in full. In Cork, journalists were asked not to reveal a crucial element of the story. Jordan and his producer, Stephen Woolley, were apparently worried that the tabloid press might give the game away.
This film marks the fifth collaboration between Jordan and Woolley. They worked together on Mona Lisaand there is much about The Crying Game that recalls that film: the racial questioning; the seediness of London' lives lived at the edge in a subterranean world. There is a part of Jordan that seems strongly drawn to glitz, seediness and tat, and to the possibilities proposed by relationships played out against such a background. At a public interview in Cork with Irish Times film critic Michael Dwyer, Jordan spoke of how the Miami Showband massacre had influenced the theme of Angel. What affected him, he said, was the way the chintzy world of the showband was the background to an appalling tragedy. In the same way, much of The Crying Game takes place around dingy London streets that are lined with loneliness rather than paved with gold. Dil drinks margheritas in The Metro where, in what is almost a parody of a seedy England, a second-rate siger intones The White Cliffs of Dover. Sexual identity becomes part of this scenario.
The film strips away illusions and presumptions. As played by Forest Whitaker, Jody, the British soldier, stays in the mind not as a military presence but as a man with savoured memories, and real fears. Like Fergus, he has been part of an oppresssed community. He is black. He tells Fergus: 'I get sent to the one place in the world they call you nigger to your face'. Drawing closer together in the glasshouse (where Jody is hooded for most of the time), the two make jokey comparisons that dispel the standard images of national identity. They compare hurling and cricket. The image of cricket recurs throughout the film: from that most Irish of places, a London building-site, Fergus looks out on a cricket-field. His dreams are disturbed by images of the dead Jody, running forward in slow motion, dressed in cricket whites and ready to bowl.
If it shows anything, the film shows that nothing, however basic, is what we expect it to be. Categories are a kind of tyranny. Mirand Richardson's tough playing of Jude, the IRA woman (in the second half of the film she resembles a gangster's moll from a Forties film) is at once seductive and brutal. Fergus, the IRA man, is boyish and far from the image of IRA men portrayed in the British tabloid press. Stephen Rea's portrayal is stellar: his performance brilliantly encapsulates a character who finds himself outside all the predictable stances. Rea, who also played the lead in Angel, presents so powerful a performance in The Crying Game he makes one forget that one is watching an actor.
The story of a relationship between a captured soldier and the IRA is not a new one. It has literary antecedents in the work of Frank O'Connor (with his story Guests of the Nation, which was filmed in 1935) and Brendan Behan (in his play The Hostage). Jordan has acknowledged his debt to Behan and has also spoken of how he was influenced by newspaper reports of British soldiers lured into traps by IRA women activists. He takes the theme much farther than either O'Connor or Behan: it becomes a stage in the gradual displacement of identity. The film's emphasis on sexuality makes it very much product of Jordan's time.
To bring this about, and to create a conclusion in which, as Stephen Rea told The Cork Examiner, 'the audience want the two men to stary together', Jordan directs with micrometer precision. From the opening scene, it is reconisably a Jordan film. The opening shots show a seaside carnival where a big wheel turns. That world of ocean and fairground, of hobby horses and chairoplanes, might easily come from The Miracle. At the interview in Cork, Jordan was questioned about the recurrence of this motif in his work. He warned against too deep an interpretation. It had more to do, he said, with the fact that he spent part of his childhood in Bettystown where such sights were common. Again, it is an example of a slightly seedy background against which brutal events are enacted. Jordan's careful direction ensures that the story has a satisfying symmetry. Situations are reversed. Fergus, initially the captor, becomes a captive himself. He gradually accepts a situation which literally made him sick. The image of the dead Jody haunts the film; Dil ends up wearing his cricket whites. Only Maguire, the tense and firm IRA commander played by Adrian Dunbar, remains unchanged.
As the title indicates, music is important in the film as, indeed, it is an essential element in Jordan's work – Angel being the best example. The song from which The Crying Game takes its name was a Sixties hit (appropriately enough, it has now been released in a new version by the androgynous Boy George and it is worth noting that it gets a mention in the title story in Night in Tunisia. Other songs play a central role that becomes more apparent as the film goes on. They include When A Man Loves A Woman and, in a neat touch at the end, Stand By Your Man sung by Lyle Lovett. That last song leaves the audience laughing. The film has many other moments of humour and the script is often hilarious. One such moment occurs when Fergus helps Jody, whose hands are tied, to pee. Awkwardness and embarrassment come together in a comic, well-controlled scene which nonetheless serves the serious purpose of showing how the two men draw closer together in a way that defies all the stereotypes of Provo and Brit. This film, in fact, leaves stereotypes in shreds.
Jordan has commented that while the film contains elements of Mona Lisa and Angel, it goes deeper than either. This is certainly true and the film is a clear testament to his maturity as a filmmaker. A lesser director might have built the entire story around the soldier's captivity, culminating in his death at the end. In The Crying Game, the soldier is dead before the film is half-over and Fergus begins the process of re-inventing the soldier's past and inventing his own future. While Jordan casts the characters in relation to each other, the film is also a study in loneliness. Stephen Woolley has been explicit about this element: 'If Mona Lisa was about Thatcherism, then The Crying Game is about isolation. As well being a love story and a film about Northern Ireland, it quite accurately reflects the social conditions in London – the suffocating underbelly of the capital's bright lights and the inherent loneliness'. A story which Jody tells Fergus, and which he in turn tells Dil at the end of the film, is ivotal to the plot. It concerns a scorpion who takes a ride across a stream from a frog. In the same way, Fergus discovers his own nature and the nature of those around him is re-defined. He tells Dil: 'I want to make you into something new'. 'I can't help what I am,' she tells him later. As it happens, it is Fergus who is made anew. Dil, a romantic, tries to believe in his love. 'You'll never leave me,' she says. 'Never,' he replies. 'I know you're lying but it's nice to hear it.'
The film will doubtless lead to intense discussion in Ireland over the way the Northern situation is depicted. Jody, the British soldier, asks Fergus: 'What do you believe in?' His answer is simple: 'That you guys shouldn't be here'. Maguire, the ruthless and tough IRA commander, resembles the commanders in other films such as Richard Spence's recently-made film of Graham Reid's You, Me and Marley. Yet The Crying Game is worlds away from earlier Troubles films. If one compares it, for example, with the 1935 film of O'Connor's Guests of the Nation, one clearly sees not merely a huge leap in cinematography but in the subtlety and complexity with which such situations are presented. O'Conor himself said of that film: 'I think that the Government would be well advised to provide the necessary money to have the picture re-filmed. It would add to the prestige of the Irish abroad, as showing the great spirit of the War of Independence.' From an ideological point of view, The Crying Game is long way from such a spirit. The social and political implications of the Northern Troubles are subsumed beneath the subtleties of personal discovery. There will undoubtedly be those who find this unsatifactory but this reviewer cannot be counted among them. In its refusal to deal in predictable types or to become a standard sociopolitical text, The Crying Game represents not merely an adavance in Jordan's development but takes its place as a prime achievement in contemporary European cinema.
Sean Dunne – Issue Film Ireland 32 (Nov/Dec 1992)
