Tuesday, May 28, 2013

The Impotence Of Being Un-Earnest


By the year 1963, the so-called British New Wave was recognized, accepted and praised by critics and audiences not only inside the country but also beyond. Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, John Schlesinger and their counterparts have found themselves well-established directors with international awards, not the rebels they had used to be. It was time for them to sum things up, to look back - in anger or not, - and to reinvent themselves.

Schlesinger's Billy Liar, despite sharing many traits with and exploiting many staples of the already canonized social realist classics, was a change of game in comparison with earlier kitchen sink films (including Schlesinger's own cut-and-dry debut, A Kind Of Loving). For one thing, Billy Liar is a comedy - most New Wave films before 1963 had been bleak dramas. Secondly, it incorporated some new techniques borrowed from the French. And, last but not least, it was less a social drama than a character study - at the same time picking on the change of the social environment that was partly provoked by the young angry men themselves.

Urban reconstruction was a popular metaphor
for the 1960s' social change
As for the the genre - or should I say the tone, for it's not a pure comedy, - Billy Liar was an early example of the shift expirienced by the New Wave. The same year saw releases of Basil Dearden's unusually light-hearted A Place To Go and Tony Richardson's period extravaganza Tom Jones, a quite unexpected follow-up to his The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner. In the following few years more would emerge - most notably, The Knack And How To Get It, The Beatles vehicle A Hard Day's Night (both directed by Richard Lester), and Alfie with Michael Caine. Billy Liar, however, is by no means a crowd-pleasing unproblematic kind of comedy; it is, as I've stated above, hardly even a comedy at all. For a comedy, it's too bitter, its ending too unhappy. Satire would be a more precise word - or tragicomedy, which often comes in hand. Schlesinger's film is almost as angry as Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, and almost as desperate as The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner. Almost, but not quite.

That latter title is especially interesting to draw parallels with - along with less known Private Porter, Richardson's masterpiece was the film that made Tom Courtenay, the star of Billy Liar, famous. Courtenay's performance in The Loneliness is emblematic for the whole movement of the young-and-angry - an angular, grim, not so bright young man, deprivated of any hope in a northern working class milieu. Unlike the characters of the above-mentioned Dearden's film, he doesn't have a place to go and never will. He spends all the film running but his run is bound to nowhere. Unempolyment office or prison - these are the only options he has.

Julie Christie as Liz, a breath of fresh air in the
town's suffocative environment
Courtenay's character in Billy Liar is very different. He is a white collar, working as a clerk in an undertaker's office, has artistic ambitions (in word rather than in deed, but still), and unlike The Loneliness' Colin he is a charismatic and cheerful lad. Billy's face is never straight, he bubbles over with mops and mows - and, being a compulsive liar, he's armed with a vivid imagination full of tall tales. Yet Billy's destiny is the same as that of Colin - he is doomed to end his days in the drab Northern town of his. The difference is, Billy chooses his fate himself - while in The Loneliness' world the mere idea of escape was impossible to conceive, Schlesinger's film assumes the feasibility of liberation, beautifully embodied by Julie Christie's Liz. Her first appearance onscreen is one of the most memorable moments in the film. For this rapidly edited scene Schlesinger adopts cinéma vérité technique - Liz is shot from a distance with no audible dialogue as she is walking around the town, seemingly aimless. While Schlesinger's style is overall influenced by the more famed New Wave from the other side of the Channel, this short sequence looks almost exactly like a hidden camera footage from a Godard movie. Liz doesn't belong here, hence the strikingly odd imagery that presages Richard Lester's portrayal of the Swinging London. Indeed, London is where she came from and where she wants Billy to go. Billy, a twentieth century's male edition of Madame Bovary, won't do that; he will go on living in his drab town as a perpetual wannabe, finding comfort in pipe dreams and reverie, impotent of anything. Even of getting laid despite being a womanizer and having three dates at the same time (there's a hint that Billy's still a virgin). His occupation as a coffin seller foretells his future; or, rather, lack of any.

Billy's job gives a handle to a couple of black jokes -
this scene shows him trying to seduce his girlfriend
amid the phallic gravestones
Schlesinger doesn't negate the social oppression coming from multiple levels of authority (even if he wanted to, his options were limited for Billy is an adaptation). Family, two bosses, and the whole social order of the town - no wonder that Billy constantly daydreams of being significant and in charge. He often fantasizes of being a military officer, or even warlord, enduing himself with symbols of ultimate masculine power - shoulder loops, peaked cap and phallic guns. There're even two imaginary killings of his primary antagonists, the father and the office superior. Billy's of course not a lunatic who can't tell reality from fantasy; cuts from the former to the latter are always abrupt - until the final sequence where the real transits to the imaginary in a cotinuous shot. Now they're one, and that is the end for our lad.

It's interesting to note that daydreaming is the mode of perception closely linked to cinema. Christian Metz in The Imaginary Signifier argues that there is more of a reverie than of a sleep in film watching - both are special modes of wakeful state; in particular, both assume staying awake but inactive. Yet I wouldn't go as far as claiming that Billy Liar is a metaphor of cinema as a mean of escape and, subsequently, source of indecision - although that would be a good explanation of the film's peculiar format: it's shot in Cinemascope just like an escapist genre flick, only it's monochrome, lacking the James Bond's rave of Technicolor. You can invent your own wide-screen country but you will still live in a black-and-white world. Unfortunately, in Billy Liar nobody goes to or talks about movies so that hypothesis would be a stretch of interpretation.

Tom Courtenay giving up: the last shots of
The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner (above),
and Billy Liar
However, Billy Liar certainly adds one reason for the despair and anger of the youth - the oppression is not only external but also internal to one's personality. A character study comes to the fore. Again, let's remember The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner, the ending of which resembles that of Billy. Courtenay's Colin in the Richardson's picture also gives up in the end - he stops before the finishing line of the race organized in prison, letting his competitor finish first and throwing away the possibility of being reformed into a decent member of society, for conforming a rotten society doesn't worth a damn. Billy, in turn, backtracks from the railway station simply because he doesn't feel like running off. Billy Liar is more inclined to the literary tradition of a psychological novel - its protagonist could find a character very akin to himself in the classical Russian novel Oblomov.

Social issues take second billing, and in contrast to the hopelessness of Billy's situation they are handled with a certain cautious optimism. The social landscape is changing, visualized by the urban development - new buildings being constructed and old ones torn down everywhere in town. A common metaphor in the Sixties - Basil Dearden, for instance, used it twice, in both A Place To Go and Victim where the first scene is set on a construction site. And there's Liz, an embodiment of hope for a change. In Darling, Schlesinger's follow-up to Billy Liar, we learn what's come out of her life in London - the very same Julie Christie stars as a fashion model at the middle of the capital's vibrant life. For Schlesinger, that film marked even further breakaway with social realist tradition and developing his Bildungsroman ambition, tied with Fellini's Dolce Vita's influence. However, Christie's Diane in Darling ended up being as desperate as many New Wave characters before her. But that is another story.

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