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For me personally it has always been a disappointment that Britain has rarely produced any filmmakers capable of exploring the surreal, the absurd, or of utilising the unlimited resources of underground avant-garde filmmaking tropes. Sure, we have a rich lineage of respectable auteurs, from Powell and Pressburger to Ken Loach right up to the current contemporary talent Shane Meadows but something all these directors share is a mastery of classical narrative film form and, particularly the latter two, an affinity with social realism. While Danny Boyle may have displayed creative flair in his early days, he has lately relaxed into the comfort of workable genre films. Perhaps Britain’s last truly experimental talent was the much-missed Derek Jarman who, before his career was tragically cut short, impressively shaped the cinematic form into his own idiosyncratic and radically visual style. Like any truly maverick director he exploited the visual possibilities of film regardless of narrative cohesion and, in for example ‘Jubilee’ (1978), crafted raw painterly surreal images that linger in the receptive viewer’s mind. Since then, however few truly maverick left-field British directors have emerged while elsewhere in the world people like David Lynch, Lukas Moodysson and Michel Gondry continue to experiment with form and style whilst maintaining loyal if small audiences. ‘The Nine Lives of Thomas Katz’ (2000), the second film by British talent Ben Hopkins seems like an attempt to redress this balance but sadly it never quite succeeds in its ambitious aims.
The film is an English farce crossed with an apocalyptic paranoia satire shot as homage to German expressionist cinema, only with sound and dialogue. Its slim narrative takes place across a single day in London where an approaching solar eclipse seems to be causing many un-explainable and bizarre events. On the same day, a mysterious hooded figure with a heavy European accent appears at the side of the M25 where he flags a taxi. The driver attempts to initiate conversation with his unusual passenger but after revealing that he emerged from the sewers, friendly casual banter is not forthcoming. Instead, the passenger investigates the driver’s dreams then steals his identity, literally taking on his physical presence.
This mysterious opening sets a paranoid tone that is sadly slowly lost over the film’s running time. The initially unsettling body-snatchers premise of complete identity theft is repeated five times in the first half hour to an increasingly diminishing effect; quite simply it is hard to be unnerved by characters changing identity when they’re so one-dimensional. The failure of this initially promising element is an unfortunate summation of the rest of the film’s intentions, and tedium soon takes hold. Most of the film’s attempts at black humour are derived from the rather pedestrian reactions of people to the bizarre happenings that are taking place. The police, who have taken to phoning in bizarre reports (such as one account of a “haunting peacock soliloquy”) are relatively useless apart from the blind psychic chief of the force who has links to the spiritual world, and his assistant, who together attempt to resolve issues. Two mysterious omnipotent characters also completely shut the London underground down with all of its passengers stuck inside but instead of panicking everyone merely stands there and listens to an increasingly absurd monologue read over the PA by a woman dressed as a 1920’s flapper girl. Meanwhile the initial figure stealing people’s identities is revealed to be Thomas Katz (Thomas Fisher), a harbinger of mysterious evil who is actually the main cause of the strange events rather than the solar eclipse, a countdown to which unsuccessfully tries to anchor events and elicit narrative tension as the film freewheels off in several directions until it resembles a series of occasionally inspired visual passages strung together by little in the way of substance or interesting dialogue. At one point a newspaper stand simply exclaims “things are happening”; meant as a humorously vague summation of the day’s random events it also proves to be an unfortunately apt description of the film itself. Yes, things are indeed happening, but we have little inclination to care after a while.
Of course, in the world of surrealist and avant-garde cinema narrative cohesion isn’t a primary concern, instead individual expression and the illogical pervasiveness of dreams is strived toward. Many better directors have used this stylistic framework (or lack of it) to hint at deeper emotion and the meanings that arise from what at first may seem like bizarre images but ‘The Nine Lives of Thomas Katz’ lacks the depth of many of its forerunners working in a similar field. Despite this some of the initial visual ideas are very interesting. The exaggerated German Expressionist style sets and lighting are expertly rendered and remain highly convincing as the whole film (despite ten minutes towards the end) is shot in high contrast black and white and often using canted camera angles, a nod that displays a great knowledge and respect for such Expressionist pioneers as Murnau and Pabst. The film also initially adopts several pleasing examples of digital post-production and animation super-impositions to a humorous effect, for example the taxi driver at the beginning is revealed to have a recurring nightmare in which he is goaded in a pub by a human man with the head of the Happy Eater corporate symbol, which we of course see enacted before us. There is also a sequence in which Katz, having stolen the form of a political spokesman, delivers a bizarre meandering speech to an audience comprising of two human female journalists and the pleasingly ramshackle sight of several layers of cardboard cut-out humans painted in harsh expressionistic lines and angles. Silent film dialogue inter-titles are also later utilised but after a while such effects appear increasingly gimmicky and pointless as if the director is merely ticking off a list of derivative visual quirks rather than utilising them for any well thought out cohesive effect.
As previously stated, dialogue and narrative were never prerequisites for this style of filmmaking but in choosing to foreground so much dialogue here Hopkins has ended up detracting from his evident visual skills. Mostly improvised, the resulting script recalls Chris Morris’ lesser work on Nathan Barley. Often, curiously English pop culture references (Alcopops, Captain Birdseye etc) are thrown in with harsher dialogue and vague philosophizing, an incongruous mixture that quickly starts to grate. ‘Dawn of the Dead’ (1978) style state of the nation news bulletins also take place throughout the film but fail to raise much in the way of panic or comedy. Again they resemble a poor attempt at Chris Morris scripted satire particularly his work on the ‘Day Today’ and ‘Brass Eye’ but while those television programmes maintained a perfect comedy balance of surrealist, satire, and nastiness here, as with so many Morris copyists, the balance remains uneven and ends up being heavy-handed satire that’s not particularly amusing, an example of which is the moment when a female interviewee who blames children for the country’s downfall produces a tuning fork that causes mass adolescent death. Upon striking it we cut to an anonymous flat in which a single mother is more shocked and upset that the resulting tone has caused her TV to break rather than her young son dropping dead. A brief item regarding the “implosion” of the stock market that resulted in everyone owing everyone else money is fleetingly amusing but ultimately lost amongst the relentless episodic tirade of weirdness that follows.
During the ongoing newsroom drama, underground lockdown, and the absurdist behaviour of the police force, eventually Thomas Katz reaches a disconcertingly huge CCTV office that alludes to the big brother paranoia of Orwell’s ‘1984’ where an operator called Dave (Paul Ritter) is informed by Katz that he can now erase anything from London at will, which he proceeds to do bit by bit as trees, cars, legs, literally everything is digitally removed from the screen. This suggests a misanthropic message that the world would be a better place if it was totally empty. Perhaps the film’s montage like stream of visual effects and bizarre speeches were meant to be a veiled comment on the perpetual-present induced by our media saturated times, suggesting that such an abundance of information will only result in nothingness and a total loss of meaning. If so, the film presents this message unsubtly and superficially, and interview comments about its piecemeal and improvised production by the director suggest that any all-encompassing message may have been lacking from the start. If all the most successful visual elements were condensed into a twenty-minute short its narrative ambiguity wouldn’t have been a problem but at 87 minutes the relentless absurdity is grating and the visual experimentation begins to wane. At its most annoying it resembles a well shot student film, impressive in its desire and ability to employ a variety of visual tricks and perfect allusions to film’s expressionist avant-garde past yet immaturely conceived in its desire to shock and confuse. This is strange as Ben Hopkins’ first film ‘Simon Magus’ (1999), had both a visual and narrative maturity that his second film lacks, which is usually the other way round, however sadly he appears to have instead used his second stab at feature film making to indulge in film school pretensions. Both his films conjured an apocalyptic end-of-an-era feel but in ‘Simon Magus’ it was the 19th to 20th century encroachment of modernism in the face of religion and so felt genuine and historically significant. However, ‘The Nine Lives of Thomas Katz’s’ apocalypse for the sake of it fails to convince and produces little emotional reaction.
Perhaps the setting could be a factor in my reaction to this film as for me the black-and-white shots of mostly drab London locations don’t lend themselves to the kind of freewheeling visually inventive surrealism Hopkins strives for. A good artistic comparison would be Canadian based director Guy Maddin. His short films, and particularly his full-length ‘The Saddest Music in the World’ (2003), use the otherness of his snowy antiquated hometown of Winnipeg to great effect as a backdrop to present absurdist situations and images very often inspired by the same silent and expressionistic cinema that Ben Hopkins alludes to here. Another similarly inclined director who utilises locations in this way is David Lynch, whose fugue-like narrative experiments take place in either fifties style American small towns or sprawling metropolises like Hollywood itself. Both directors subvert the familiar and accentuate areas of unfamiliarity to debase audience’s expectations. Of course, being familiar with London it is hard for me to detach myself from its reality and locations in the USA and Canada will therefore always have an added instant curiosity factor for me as I’ve never been there. With this said I still can’t help but hope that a director who deals in the surreal and the absurd will one day produce a film that exploits the city’s mysterious elements and uses London specifically as a backdrop to something truly experimental and daring. ‘The Nine Lives of Thomas Katz’, although occasionally visually intriguing, sadly isn’t that film.
Country: UK/Germany
Budget:
Length: 89mins
Filmography:
‘The Saddest Music in the World’, 2003, Guy Maddin, Rhombus Media
‘Simon Magus’, 1999, Ben Hopkins, Film Four
‘Dawn of the Dead’, 1978, George A. Romero, Laurel Group
‘Jubilee’, 1978, Derek Jarman, Megalovis
Pub/2008
More like this:
Simon Magus, 1999, directed by Ben Hopkins
Naboer (Next Door), 2005, directed by Pal Sletaune
71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, 1994, directed by Michael Haneke