Is this man a sicko?
A violent ending to an intelligent film has created controversy around director Thomas Clay
The box-office girls at the Thessaloniki Film Festival aren’t in the habit of offering commentary as they sell you your ticket, but the young brunette behind the counter seemed to shudder slightly when I asked for ‘One for The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, please’. “Oh my goodness, you’re going to see that?” she exclaimed, tapping away at her keyboard. “We saw it last night, and I’m still recovering!”. She proffered the ticket and gave me a brave smile, like a wife seeing her husband off to war.
Robert Carmichael provokes strong reactions. One punter at the Internet Movie Database wrote, “This movie commits what I would call an emotional rape on the viewer” – though another calls it “a thoughtful, sparse, elegant, disturbing, beautifully paced and above all brave piece of work”. The film is British, but many of the fiercest attacks have come from UK critics. “I’ll be frank and say I found [it] utterly revolting,” wrote Andrew Pulver in Sight & Sound (the official magazine of the British Film Institute) after it premiered at the Cannes Festival.
The main bone of contention is the “rape-torture-murder scene” that acts as the movie’s climax, in which a trio of drug-addled young men – including the titular Robert – break into the home of a celebrity chef and his wife. What happens next is graphic and unpleasant, culminating in the wife being brutally violated with a bottle and a metal poker. What kind of sicko makes a film like that, you ask?
The sicko in question is Thomas Clay, the film’s writer-director – and he’s probably not what you expect. He’s shy and soft-spoken, his bushy beard making him look older than his 25 years; he has an air of focused serenity, like a happy monk. It’s no surprise that film is his vocation, that in fact he’s wanted to make films since the age of three. As for the controversy around Robert Carmichael, he seems quite phlegmatic. Many people like it, he points out; the film has been sold in 20 countries, including the US and UK. Did he set out to court controversy? “No,” he replies simply.
“It’s kind of a knee-jerk thing,” he adds, speaking of the shock and outrage it’s caused in some quarters. “People respond to whatever the latest media outcry is… to be honest, I thought people would be used to that kind of thing by now. I mean, there’s nothing new about violence in Cinema”. For him, media ‘outrage’ is a lazy response, “an easy way of relating to the film – or not relating to the film, not having to engage with what’s going on in it”.
There’s actually a lot “going on” in Robert Carmichael, set in a small English town (filmed in Newhaven, near Clay’s native Brighton). Only the climax is violent – that’s why it’s shocking – the rest being a study of various alienated youngsters, with many a dig at New Labour and the war in Iraq. In fact, the infamous rape scene cuts at the moment of climax to a flurry of war footage, as if to say the war is analogous to the boys’ random violence – and if you think that’s pretentious, note that the film is photographed by Giorgos Arvanitis (known for his work with Angelopoulos) and the title comes from a 1975 Werner Herzog movie, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner. Clay is a serious cinephile, not a nasty-minded sleaze merchant; if anything, he finds “almost a prejudice” in the UK “against taking things too seriously. It’s like a kind of reverse snobbery.”
In fact, the real story of Robert Carmichael may be how it was made – which may also explain the hostility from ‘official’ UK film circles, because Clay is a true independent. His background was “standard middle-class” (he’d rather not say what his parents do) but he’s never been to film school, having taken advantage of the Children’s Film Unit – a fine-sounding programme helping teenagers learn about film equipment – and spent most weekends from the ages of 13-16 messing around with a 16mm camera. When it came time to finance Robert Carmichael, he only had one ‘official’ short to his name – a 40-minute film called Motion – but had been around movie cameras for nearly a decade, his only “diversion” being a music degree he half-completed before dropping out, getting a job in a supermarket and planning his film career.
Didn’t the script scare off investors, I wonder? It was slightly different when he sent it round to potential financiers, admits Thomas (no rape-by-bottle, I imagine) – but it didn’t matter, since the UK offers tax-breaks for film production. Robert Carmichael was financed entirely by individuals, no government money or EU support; he and his producer “went around networking, trying to find people who had some spare money they could put in the film”. They could only raise enough to shoot it, but one of the investors agreed to pay additional costs so the film could be completed.
And now here he is, two years later – doing the festival rounds from Cannes to Thessaloniki, already planning his next project (a “Western-type thriller” about private military contractors in Afghanistan) and basking in self-made success. Good for him, I say. “No-one in the film really deserves anything that happens to them; it’s a product of circumstances,” says Thomas Clay of Robert Carmichael – but life isn’t always so random. Some deserve more than others, and people create their own circumstances. He’s the living proof.
