24 March 2014
High Rise
A film by Ben Wheatley
is reviewed by Raj M. Host
You may think you have read a lot about towers in the Shaw Sheet recently; to add to your pleasure, here is some more. Equally, if you are watching “The Night Manager” by John Le Carre, on BBC1 on Sunday nights, and you are enjoying seeing a lot of Tom Hiddleston’’ naked body, well, here is an opportunity to add to that pleasure too.
J G Ballard is best known amongst the British public for “Empire of the Sun”, a story based on his real life experiences as a small boy in captivity in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during World War Two, made into powerful and evocative film. Ballard famously claimed that his time in the camp was “not unpleasant”, at least from a child’s perspective, but one might wonder, when considering his extensive body of work, whether there may have been an element of pleasure displacement going on for the rest of his life. Ballard was fascinated by disaster, decay, catastrophe, atrocity, death, and grotesque manifestations of the human condition that are often overlooked or avoided. The prime example of his true genre (Empire of the Sun was rather outside his normal run of work) was perhaps his novel “Crash”, which dwells at some length on the erotic possibility of automobile accidents, the public interest in the subject been considerably heightened by Ballard’s own involvement in a serious car accident shortly after publication.
Ballard famously lived most of his adult life in a semi in Shepperton, not, as one might assume from his book “High Rise”, in one of London’s 1970’s concrete high-rise residential blocks . Now his vision of English society and manners, as rearranged over 45 floors of brand new Brutalist and brutal construction somewhere in west London, has been brought to the film screen by Ben Wheatley. Wheatley is well fitted for the job, his previous form in this arena encompassing his observations on vicious criminal life in Brighton in “Down Terrace”; vicious English Civil War life in “A Field in England”; and vicious caravan park life in “Sightseers”. You are probably getting the idea that Mr Wheatley is not doing a lot of comedy at this point in his career; and that his world vision probably would have been approved of by Ballard.
But the main action in High Rise opens quite promisingly with Mr Hiddleston (as Dr Robert Laing) sunbathing (naked of course) on the balcony of his new flat in the 45 floor high-rise block into which he has just moved. When a beautiful neighbour peers down at this splendid sight, Laing begins his climb through a society that is defined by levels. Laing is, significantly, on floor 25, middle of the middle of his tower. He soon finds that life lower down, on floor 2 is appalling, maybe aspirational, maybe anarchic. But life at the top, on floor 45, is heavenly; glass and stainless steel inside, clipped hedges and verdant lawns outside. For here lives God (Jeremy Irons; who else could be so fitted to play such a role); God is an architect, or rather, the Architect. The Architect has created all this and ordains its condition. To be invited to his parties is the final mark of acceptance; to be moved down the building is social death.
In one massive construction of poured concrete, Ballard managed to encapsulate not just the English class system, but also the human sub-conscious. The vulgar simple types at the bottom are the id, the primal urges; above them lurks the ego, driving transformation of the mind into the happy polished denizens of the top, the superego. Ballard’s stroke of genius was that the all-powerful, perfectly adjusted superego was an architect; in fact, a skit on a particular architect, Erno Goldfinger, designer of the Balfron Tower in east London, and the Trellik Tower in west London, concertos in concrete. Goldfinger (who obviously provoked strong emotions in writers – Ian Fleming also dripped vitriolic ink over a rather fatter version) famously moved into Balfron Tower – for six weeks, thereafter hastily returning to his serene Hampstead terrace.
Wheatley wonderfully captures the nuances of all these significant positionings and aspirational behaviours. It was always said that to film this book would be impossible; indeed, several attempts were made. Wheatley has made it look easy. It does mark a major move into the big time for him – though he might bitterly reject such an establishment orientated suggestion. Certainly he has lured a superb cast to make his dystopian vision work, to say nothing of creating an utterly convincing atmosphere of 1975 (pre-Thatcher, for younger readers). Dr R Laing (readers will by now have possibly made the connection that Ballard was not just fingering architects here) moves lightly and elegantly to the top, and finds life on the summit, whilst in some ways pleasing, is unsettling and uncertain.
The building is new, it is, the Architect says, “settling”. It might be truer to say it is unsettling. The power fails; the lifts fail. Can society survive in the form the Architect has ordained; or must it too fail?
This is not a film for the squeamish, or for the fastidious. But it is a brilliant evocation of Ballard’s book, it is wonderfully acted, and it is the sort of film which will long linger in the mind – and may awkwardly revisit the memory whilst you wait for the lift on a 29th floor, or consider a visit to the communal swimming pool of your building (why do films of 2016 have to feature swimming pools?).
Ballard was very quotable. Amongst his many carefully chosen memorable aphorisms were: “In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom”. This film does suggest a remarkably high level of sanity lurking to ambush those of us who have the, now slightly, nervous pleasure of living in tower blocks.
Fans of classic cars will enjoy spotting a vast range of 1970’s and 1960’s motor cars in the car park of the troubled tower. Dog lovers, on the other hand, or paw, may wish to avert their eyes. And admirers of Mrs Thatcher may long puzzle over her crisply enunciated words that accompany the closing moments. Is Mr Wheatley a closet admirer of the Iron Lady; or just ironic?
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