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Perfect Strangers - a ReviewI like it! The one and a half hours passed like fifteen minutes. The writing is literate, subtle, intelligent; the cinematography (or should it be videography? I don't know whether it was shot on film or video) stylish; the acting superb. And by the way, Poliakoff both wrote and directed. In the cast are two Poliakoff stalwarts, Lindsay Duncan and Timothy Spall (and what a way he has come since Auf Wiedersehen, Pet!), as well as Matthew Macfadyen, Claire Skinner, Toby Stephens, the magnificent Anton Lesser, and, best of all, Michael Gambon. The story? A family reunion in a posh London Hotel, paid for by the - in financial terms, at any rate - paterfamilias. The family is Jewish, immigrant, successful, except for the "Hillingdon contingent", which consists of Raymond (Gambon), Esther (Jill Baker) and their son Daniel (Macfadyen). Raymond is the black sheep of the family, having been bankrupted by trying to run the company he inherited from his father in a socially aware manner. They have been cut off from the rest of the family for many years: Daniel, indeed, has never met any of those at the "reunion". Behind it lies a complex of themes: the confusion of the second generation immigrant, the need to find an anchor in the past, memory, acceptance, guilt, discovery... Here Poliakoff takes further the technique which he used to such good effect in Picturing the Past, telling the story through old photographs. Through his careful use, these photographs acquire resonance. The camera lingers on them, investing them with significance and even a certain ambivalence. Raymond, for instance, is shown a sequence of photographs of his father doing a strange dance, something which leaves him totally puzzled, for he cannot imagine his father acting in such a way. But when the series of pictures is complete, it is clear that his father was dancing for him as a little boy - and yet the whole incident has gone completely out of his memory. Daniel, too, is shown a photograph of himself as a little boy. In it he is dressed in a way which is utterly unfamiliar to him; but not only are the clothes unfamilar, the place is too. And yet, very soon after seeing them, he finds the place and one of the shoes, yet both clothing and place remain totally unfamiliar. The two sets of photographs haunt Raymond and Daniel, as they do the viewer. They remain in the memory longer than much of the "action". Germaine Greer, in the Newsnight Review, says, "But they had to keep lingering on them, and occasionally you felt 'if you take this much more slowly you are going to run out of steam'." She is so very wrong! The slowness, the lingering, adds layer upon layer of significance and meaning. It creates a haunting, dreamlike quality which blends in with and reinforces the dreamlike situation, so that we even begin to wonder if perhaps the whole thing might be a dream, something happening inside Daniel's mind. One hopes that this isn't the case! Poliakoff is too mature an artist to descend to such banalities, the mainstay of so much children's writing in English lessons ("I woke up and it was all a dream"). But what affected me most was the sheer strength and quality of the acting. It was little short of superb. I tend to avoid much of what passes for what we might call "cultural" TV drama - the adaptations of classic novels, for instance, of Dickens, Austen and the like - for all too often the performances are triumphs of style over substance, surface glamour with little beneath but technique. Forget your Firths and your Fienneses (Ralph anyway: Joseph is a different matter), drama students should be made to study Michael Gambon's performance in Perfect Friends: it is an object lesson in acting, a joy to behold. So, in its own way, is Anton Lesser's performance. When I turn to my left as I type this article, I see on my wall a photo of a young Anton Lesser playing Mark Antony (The Tyne Wear Theatre Company's Julius Caesar, directed by Bill Alexander, at the Newcastle Playhouse in, I think, the late seventies - I should remember as I took the picture!). At that time I thought he had a great future as a Shakespearean actor: I certainly didn't imagine that more than twenty years later I would see him as brilliant character actor. In fact, that term "character actor" is totally the wrong one to use, for it suggests a sort of skin-deep performance, whereas the very odd Stephen is, in Lesser's hands, a fully rounded, totally real person. There are another two weeks to go. The writing may falter - although I very much doubt it - but even if it does, the piece is worth watching for the quality of the acting alone. By the way, Perfect Strangers is available as a BBC video (price £14.99) from 14th May. I'm going to buy it! Articles Indices: |
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