Red Road
Directed by Andrea Arnold
There’s no shortage of contenders when considering cinematic masterpieces to which the spectacularly unsettling drama, Red Road, deserves comparison. Critics have name-dropped a flurry of entries in the thriller genre to validate the movie’s immediate canonization: Rear Window, The Conversation and Michael Haneke’s Cache all make recurring appearances in the plethora of positive reviews. Considering its nuanced portrait of a troubled woman (Kate Dickie) engaged in voyeuristic obsession, Red Road undoubtedly earns its entrance into that prestigious crowd—but director Andrea Arnold insists on being coy in response to the accolades.
“I don’t know how to write a thriller,” says the 46-year-old British filmmaker. “I don’t sum it for myself in that way. I don’t have an external idea of what I’m doing. I just write the story in the strongest way I can.” But Arnold, whose experience behind the camera on Red Road marked her first time as the director of a feature-length production, doesn’t deny the value in placing her creation within a preexisting tradition. “People can watch it and sum it up,” she says. “I don’t want to explain it—dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. It leaves room for people to work out what’s going on.”
Whatever labels it merits, Red Road surely demands that viewers pay attention. The plot builds to its boiling point, eventually erupting into a veritable symphony of explicit and poignant emotional expression. Arnold’s protagonist, who spends her late-night shift as a security guard watching the exploits of a mysterious man caught on camera, appears deeply unhappy. It takes most of the running time, however, to figure out the source of her woes. “Someone said to me that in a thriller the audience knows what the main character knows,” Arnold explains. “In Red Road, that’s not the case.”
The story unfolds as a highly elaborate psychological jigsaw puzzle, using the subtleties of Dickie’s performance as a key to her character’s misery. “I’ve read lots of scripts that describe things very briefly,” Arnold says. “Mine was quite descriptive. That’s me trying to feel the scene.” Indeed, extended sequences in Red Road unfurl without the aid of dialogue. A particularly memorable moment finds Dickie pursuing the enigmatic man into his house and crashing his party; the gliding camera and relaxed rhythm of the editing create a dense visual prose. “It lends itself to being that way,” Arnold says. “We’re watching somebody who’s watching people.”
At least one aspect of Red Road exists outside of Arnold’s technique: the characters. Her movie completes the first movement of an operation called The Advance Party. Created by veteran filmmaker Lars von Trier and fleshed out by producers Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen, the project involves three beginning directors who are provided with character descriptions and allowed to mold them as they please. Arnold had to give her heroine a job with a uniform, but everything else came from the director’s imagination. “You could very easily make it into your own thing,” she recalls.
The skill of Arnold’s direction hardly comes from beginner’s show business luck. She acted on British television during her childhood and won an Oscar for her short film Wasp in 2005, while hammering out the script for Red Road. In January of that year, she bounced the first draft off a handful of writers during a Sundance lab. Shooting began in October and less than a year later, the movie snagged the prestigious Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and since its overseas opening in May 2006, Red Road has received a multitude of awards to finally open in the U.S. this week.
Now immersed in the writing process for her next feature, Arnold doesn’t seem bothered by the delay. “It’s like I’m 20 or something,” she says about the way journalists have deemed her a first-timer. Without a touch of cynicism, she smiles. “It’s a journey, filmmaking. There’s no beginning, middle or end. I’ve been emerging for 18 years.
