52 Films Directed By Women Vol 1: 12. THE VIOLATORS (Director: Helen Walsh)
There are still fewer women novelists who may have made the
transition. So Helen Walsh, the British novelist turned writer-director of The Violators, is at the very least in
British filmmaking terms a trail blazer. That isn’t to say that her debut
feature - a ‘micro-budget’ drama about a fifteen-year-old girl, Shelly (Lauren
McQueen) excluded from school living with her two brothers, who makes two
unfortunate new friends, with a troubled upper middle-class girl and a much
older loan shark, Mikey Flanagan (Stephen Lord) - is a roaring success. It is
very far from that. It demonstrates the pitfalls of first-time directors
working in a medium they appreciate but don’t fully understand.
Walsh’s self-confessed point of reference is the
social-realist work of the Dardenne Brothers. When she met her director of
photography eight days before shooting, she had a long conversation about the
opening shot of The Son. But long
sequences take time and money to set up. Walsh, who shot the film in four
weeks, had neither. What we see instead are lots of scenes of Shelley walking
over fields or down the backs of alleys – if there is an alley that oozes
neglect, Walsh’s camera is there. These
shots do not convey realism.
The title suggests a B-movie drama, a ‘roaring rampage of
revenge’ to quote the tagline for Kill
Bill. It isn’t exactly a spoiler to say that it isn’t. The title comes from
a sequence that Walsh filmed but isn’t in the movie in which two girls kidnap a
man and violate him. It sounds like a completely different movie than the one
Walsh ended up making.
Novel writing and movie directing are disciplines. You have
to know what you are leaving out and what you are left with in order to
determine the effects that you are hoping to achieve. Walsh described her
script-writing process as ‘casting first, then paring back’ and only
discovering the style of the film on the first day of shooting. This is
different from directors who imagine the sort of film they want to make and
then work with their collaborators to achieve it. In lay terms, The Violators represents a loss of
artistic vision, a process more akin to a documentary maker discovering her
subject. This process may yield rewards. But if you are married to a narrative
in which scenes demand a coherent pay-off in the world you are creating, you
end up betraying the audience. You ask them to care about the conditions in
which the characters find themselves and then avoid any sort of meaningful
resolution.
The Violators
starts well. It begins with an out-of-focus shot of a ‘penny shuffle’, a
machine that invites gamblers to drop a coin into a slot to dislodge more coins
balancing precariously over an edge. The shot is held for some time before
Shelly, back to the camera wearing a Parka coat – a signifier of working-class
poverty, utilitarian comfort but no style, designed for extreme temperatures
but worn to disguise body shape, a ‘check out the spikes on my fleecy hood’
coat that shouts ‘don’t come near me, all right’ – drops a few coins fruitlessly.
They call them fruit machines in arcades, but they’re fruitless really,
draining the last squeezed drop of fading hope. Shelly wanders round the arcade
before retrieving her twelve-year-old (mixed race) brother, Jerome (Callum King
Chadwick) from her older brother Andy’s (Derek Barr) front room. There’s
football on - penalties. Shelley takes Jerome to bed. The next morning, she
prepares breakfast by scoping up Cocoa Pops (or equivalent) with her hand before
pouring them into a bowl and drinks water from the tap. It is her fifteenth
birthday and Jerome has bought her a card where she has had to alter the age
with a biro and a present of a pencil tin. Andy, who we first think of as
either Shelly’s boyfriend or a young-looking dad, has bought her nothing.
Instead he drags them to Job Centre Plus for an interview.
In the course of these scenes, Walsh loses verisimilitude. Jerome
is way too obedient as he is taken away from the footie. Andy explodes into
anger after the Job Centre Plus interview because Jerome gave his mother’s
address (‘I forgot’). ‘I know your game – you’re hoping to move back in with
her,’ cries Andy. There is the threat of violence and of real impact on their
income. There is a middle-class social worker, but Shelley tries to avoid her.
Having reached pubescence, Shelly is the object of lust. As
she prowls around looking to break into cars – we see her do that later on – so
boys want to give her something in exchange ‘for a suck’. She ventures into a
pawn shop to exchange her necklace for a lighter. Mikey, the bearded man behind
a counter doesn’t agree, but follows her and offers her the lighter for free.
‘Don’t I get something?’ he asks. Shelly lives in a word where every act of
apparent generosity from a stranger is treated with justifiable suspicion. As
we learn later on, something very bad happened in her childhood involving her
father.
Where is her mother? We never hear about her. The suggestion
is that all three are abandoned, with Andy functioning as a legal guardian to
keep the family together. Shelly isn’t close to him – the suggestion is that
all three of them have different mothers – and they don’t have conversations
where they talk about their future. They live in their own little world -
bubbles of drift.
There is a knock at the door. It is Mikey. Andy owes him
money. Bizarrely, instead of staying behind a locked door, he attempts to flee
over the back garden wall. This is another scene that defies belief. Mikey
catches up with the brother and starts beating him up. Then Shelley appears.
Mikey also has an admirer, Rachel (Brogan Ellis). She calls
him whilst he is in the shop. He pretends to be in Manchester. The location of
the film is never specified, but the film was shot in the Wirral (Birkenhead).
We see a military boat moored in harbour, cranes and gulls wheeling overhead.
Rachel catches Shelly breaking into a car and tells a passing security man that
it is hers. She then takes Shelly to her house. Rachel has her own problems
with her mother, who is dating a man who uses her for sex. We see Rachel
slipping into a house and stealing things – this before she meets Rachel.
After Shelly steals from Rachel’s house and tries on a top –
we wonder if Rachel too desires her as she watches her change – Rachel
introduces Shelly into her rebellious world, going to a restaurant, ordering
sparkling wine and then spits it into a bucket. At Rachel’s request they leave
the restaurant without paying. Rachel, who resembles a young Chloe Sevigny, is
needy, a student who takes fencing lessons, who possibly has anger issues.
Meanwhile, Mikey gives Jerome some trainers and offers Shelly
a gift. Andy encourages her to get it. It is a dress. Shelly refuses it, but
the next day the gift is waiting for her.
About halfway through, there is a bombshell. The social
worker tells the family that their father has got parole. All three stood up in
court and gave evidence against him. Now they are afraid for their lives. Andy
already knew but said nothing. Why? We don’t find out.
There is one character, Kieran (Liam Ainsworth) a young man
who signed up for the cadets heading for a career in military service, who
offers the family a way out. He and Jerome bond over repairing a bicycle. But
then, in an unconvincing scene, the boy has it stolen and is beaten up. He
spends most of the subsequent scenes motionless and in bed – Walsh really
doesn’t know how to direct young actors. When he does come down the stairs in
response to Mikey banging on the door it is to tell Mikey (off camera) that the
family fears for their dad. Mikey exploits this fear by telling Shelly that
he’s been around.
This revelation leads to a change in Shelly’s relationship
with Mikey. She is willing to let him have sex with her in the back of his
Range Rover. Walsh doesn’t flinch from showing a man having sex with a minor
and we fear for Shelly who has abandoned her last line of sceptical defence.
By the end of the film, there is a confrontation involving a
gun looked after by Rachel but by this point, the action veered on the risible
– not least because the gun looked like an antique. If there is one cliché that
Walsh should have been aware of is that characters are never just given guns;
they are always shown how to fire them (so we know there are bullets and that
the gun works). It is disappointing that the film ends on such a damp squib.
One key revelation involving Rachel’s father is muffled by inaudible sound.
Walsh has a reputation as a novelist but on the basis of
this is unlikely to generate one as a filmmaker. The film needed a little more
money, a more certain touch with character and a sense of what it is really
about. The scenes in which the social worker barges in and pronounces are
risible – she is just there to kick start the plot. The events in the film,
though based on social phenomena – children left to fend for themselves, loan
sharks and a disturbed middle-class adolescent - are rendered in a banal way. I
would go so far to say that The Violators
is an embarrassment. After emotional scenes, the actors seem exposed – what
they give of themselves playing the parts isn’t used in a meaningful way. Walsh
needs a filmmaking mentor and to admit where her talents don’t lie. She can
admire the best in World Cinema but cannot reproduce it. My least favourite
scene featured Andy suddenly leaving a pub hearing that his father was back –
none of the extras turn round. Sudden movement always produces a reaction. To
film life, you have to know what life is.
Reviewed at the
Underwire Film Festival, Hackney Picturehouse (Screen 4), East London, Friday
20 November 2015, London Premiere
Originally published on Bitlanders.com
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