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  1. Culture
8 February 2011updated 04 Oct 2023 10:31am

Gilbey on Film: lovable Roeg

This great British director's movies are enjoying a deserved revival.

By Ryan Gilbey

Two pieces of Nicolas Roeg-related good news arrived this morning. The first came in the post: a copy of BFI Southbank’s March programme, with its long-overdue Roeg season.

It’s no exaggeration to say that I grew up on Roeg; my tastes were shaped, and my horizons broadened, by his films. I came of cinema-going age during what is generally considered the start of his downward slide: the first film of his that I saw at the cinema was Castaway in 1986, followed by the unloved curiosity that is Track 29 — a freaky, Dennis Potter-scripted adult fairy-tale with a mix’n’match cast (Gary Oldman, Back to the Future‘s Christopher Lloyd and Roeg’s wife Theresa Russell, a regular fixture in his work for 12 years beginning with 1979’s Bad Timing). The Witches, Roeg’s traumatic 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel, was a gruesome joy right up to the moment of its compromised ending, and went some way toward bringing the director back into favour.

But Cold Heaven, the fraught and creepy psychological thriller that marked his last collaboration with Russell, drifted on to video after a couple of festival screenings; I remember seeing Roeg on a TV arts show around that time, arguing that the film’s themes and concerns were not dissimilar from those found in the then-current blockbuster Total Recall. It wasn’t a far-fetched claim by any means, but there was palpably the sense that cinema audiences, critics and the industry in general had moved on from Roeg.

Funny to think that films as scandalous (in both formalist and visual terms) as Performance, Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth could have become part of the canon, but maybe that was one aspect of the problem: possibly we felt we had all the Nicolas Roeg films we wanted, and we had no further use for any more. So I mourn the fact that Roeg never got to shoot his much-mooted adaptation of Martin Amis’s Night Train, or to bring to the screen Paul Theroux’s clammy thriller Chicago Loop with James Spader (Theroux had dedicated the novel to Roeg — with whom he had conjured up the plot — and Russell). He remained instead effectively relegated to TV, or forgotten, ever since.

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As for the question of whether a falling-off in quality had contributed to this general fatigue in our response to him, that is not something I can answer until I’ve watched the later movies again. Were I to defer now to my teenage self for an opinion, there’s every chance he would rave long into the evening without discernment before asking if anyone knows how to get hold of a “This Charming Man” 12-inch for under £20.

The other bulletin from the world of Roeg is the appearance of Don’t Look Now at the top of Time Out‘s just-published Top 100 Best British Films poll, which proves that he is still greatly treasured after all this time (Perfomance, Walkabout and Bad Timing also make appearances further down the list), but also that we have decided collectively to write off the later films and give obeisance to the accepted masterpieces.

Either way, the recognition is reassuring, considering the debt that modern film-makers (Christopher Nolan in Memento, Alejandro González Iñárritu in 21 Grams and Babel, Steven Soderbergh in The Limey, Julio Medem in The Red Squirrel) owe to the fractured, associative storytelling style pioneered by the likes of Resnais and Roeg. It isn’t simply a case of throwing the scenes up in the air and cutting them together in whichever order they fall; there’s an intuitive quality to Roeg’s mosaic textures, so that colours, sounds, words and visual echoes can cause a sudden ricochet effect in the narrative chronology.

I still think of Roeg as one of cinema’s great cerebral and emotional forces, yet I didn’t vote for any of his films in my own contribution to the poll: were there too many other contenders, or had he just become too familiar to me, so much a part of myself that I had failed even to notice him any more? A bit of the former but more of the latter, I think.

When I got to interview him in 1995 (before the release of his film Two Deaths), he disputed the long-rumoured story that he liked to leave a cinema halfway through whatever film he happened to be watching so that he could imagine the rest himself. It really doesn’t matter that it isn’t true because it fits: something in that mixture of perverseness and imagination gets close to the essence of Roeg.

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