Antonia Bird, who died last week aged 62, was a big deal in British cinema of the 1990s, and made at least one notable contribution to filmmaking the following decade: her taut and troubling television film The Hamburg Cell, about the preparations for the 9/11 hijackings. Her work is not, sadly, that widely known or discussed any more. The one that tends to be—Priest, which starred Linus Roache as a closeted Catholic clergyman in Liverpool—was hobbled by a didactic Jimmy McGovern screenplay (if that isn’t a tautology). Her best work with actors can be seen in Safe, a scrupulously tough 1993 BBC film about homelessness, where she coaxed brave, bruised performances from Aidan Gillen, Kate Hardie and Robert Carlyle; and in Face, a 1997 heist movie: not a great piece of cinema itself but one in which Ray Winstone and Phil Davis bringing aching tenderness to their old-lag roles.
Bird worked in Hollywood with mixed results (the 1995 Mad Love, a teen romance with clumsily handled mental illness themes, was an unhappy experience for its makers and its audience alike). But I still admire her most bizarre and uncharacteristic movie, Ravenous, the 1999 cannibal horror-comedy-western that she was brought in to salvage after two previous directors had already jumped or been pushed. It’s mere inches away from being a truly great movie. But it is an enjoyably berserk one. Parts of it reach giddy heights of operatic intensity, helped by a churning and inventive score from Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn (the latter had acted for Bird in Face).
The look of Ravenous is pure McCabe and Mrs Miller—pastoral snowbound plains through which grizzled soldiers trudge on a mission to find the half-masticated human remains spoken of by an unhinged stranger (Carlyle, daft as a brush, mad as a hatter). The tone is half-revue, half-snuff movie, as the corpses mount up and the jokes get ever more grisly. An acquired taste, perhaps, but the eccentric cast (including Guy Pearce, David Arquette and Jeffrey Jones) add spice. Perfect for Halloween, too.
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