|
|
| COLD COMFORT FARM
blinded
A FULL-BLOWN GOTHIC
MELODRAMA SET IN A REMOTE SCOTTISH
FARMHOUSE, BLINDED TAKES A UNIVERSAL THEME AND GIVES IT A
FEW TWISTS,
SUGGESTS FLETCHER REID.
|
Scottish writer/director Peter Mullan is, as ever, direct and to the point when it comes to explaining what made him commit to Eleanor Yule’s debut feature, Blinded. “When I read her script,” says Mullan, “I loved the fact that she had dared to write this big, fuck-off Gothic melodrama. Here was someone who was really trying to do something different. I liked that.”
With a BAFTA-nominated short and a number of acclaimed documentaries to her credit, Yule was keen to take what she had learned from her non-fiction work about the links between people and place and apply it to a fictional story. She was also determined to show how the kinds of intense emotional stories, from Zola’s Thérèse Raquin to the Oscar-winning Hollywood movie American Beauty, could just as well happen close to home.
“I had made a lot of films about people who lived in these baronial-style homes,” she says, “and what I wanted to say was, ‘Well, this is also the kind of thing we’ve got going on here [in Scotland]. How does that connect with other cultures?’ Ultimately, what I really wanted to achieve was a film that connected outwards.”
Blinded is set in a large, remote and rambling Scottish farmhouse inhabited by a family who could have come straight out of a Strindberg play. Mullan’s character, Francis, is blind and bitter about the accident that robbed him of his ability to operate independently. He has become a bully and a tyrant, capable of moments of sudden violence, and his movements about the house are as unpredictable as his moods. Even Mullan struggled to find something likeable in Francis. “It’s more about blindness of the soul,” he says. “He’s redeemable only in the sense that he’s a human being. He’s in such emotional pain that he’s become used to it. When you’re in the darkness and someone screams in your face and says they hate your guts… well, it’s better than nothing.”
|
|
|
