We spoke to Rowan Joffe about his new film “Brighton Rock”
The difference between original films and remakes is that the majority of classics are timelessly relevant and the majority of remakes are shit. Filmmakers are plagued in attempts to remake a film without lazily replicating or defiantly individuating from the former production. What’s the fucking point?
Rowan Joffe, a relatively inexperienced director and new to feature films, seems an unexpected selection for the remake of Brighton Rock, considered one of the most highly celebrated examples of British cinema and film noir. It’s not particularly wise to hang yourself professionally from the baby steps of the career ladder. He openly admits that, initially, he wanted to shirk from the grossly impossible task of bettering, or equalling, the original.
But Joffe must have had some inkling of the hype that would surround the film. His rising profile (Joffe directed recent Channel 4 multi award-winning dramas Secret Life and The Shooting of Thomas Hundall) certainly hasn’t suffered from making such a ballsy move. After reading the 1939 Graham Greene book of Brighton Rock and falling ‘madly in love’, Joffe says that he had the ‘perhaps “insane” idea to avoid remaking the movie and instead adapt the book… Like a Shakespeare play it deserves more than one interpretation’.
He’s made the decision to modernise the script to 1964, a way of differentiating from the book and the Boulting Brothers classic, and because the plot seemed strangely appropriate for the era. 1964 was the last year of the death penalty in Britain. The Krays were being kept busy tearing off fingernails and stabbing people in basements; organised crime prominently featured in the media; the whining of women was beginning to be heard. This enables the females, Rose and Ida, to be empowered, decisive and far less passive. Also, the sixties are like, eternally really cool to key trendsetter demographic.
Photos from behind the scenes taken by Fergus McDonald
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The film tells the story of jaded soul and “fallen angel” Pinkie, as he desperately and aimlessly clambers up the ranks of an organised gang, marrying an innocent young girl to secure her silence over a murder that he has committed. He’s that ever-familiar combination of arrogance and insecurity. Being young is tough.
Some pretty mean film reviews have suggested that Joffe has ignominiously forsaken the book. It’s true that he copped out of representing the books’ Catholicism in all it’s fear-instilling, damnation glory, and most notably altered the original, melancholy ending – maybe under pressure from production companies to satisfy the masses, maybe to pay homage to the first film. Either way, it was a misinformed decision and a shame. But the film has a number of mentionable redeeming qualities.
For a start, there’s a real energy to the naivety and ingenuousness of both the direction and the characters of Pinkie and Rose. There have been comments that Sam Riley is too old to play the part (Riley is thirty, Pinkie is seventeen). I don’t think it matters. But he does fall short of emulating the untamed hostility of a young Richard Attenborough.
The picture is a patent amalgamation of influences, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You can entirely appreciate what the filmmakers were trying to achieve. I was totally grateful for the sympathetic noirish score, rather than a swinging soundtrack to the sixties. And there is a stylistic naturalism that engages you in a way that a more sophisticated production couldn’t. John Mathieson’s cinematography is distinctly modern, while referencing the sixties and low-key expressionism. There are, in fact, a lot of elements right with the film and not a lot of garishly wrong. Unfortunately, it is going to be compared to that that came before and it isn’t as good as the original, and it isn’t as good as the book. But it’s not shit.
Words by Amelia Phillips
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