Red Riding Trilogy

Directed by Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, Anand Tucker

Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy (Criterion DVD)

SURELY IT’S SOME kind of joke that Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy (Open City, Paisan, Germany Year Zero) was released on the market in a newly restored Criterion edition the same time as the British noir Red Riding Trilogy. The joke’s on us, made by the gatekeepers of contemporary film culture who roll over for trendy garbage, ready to acclaim anything they think is new.

It is absolutely fair to compare the Red Riding Trilogy (about 10-year journalistic and police investigations into the serial killings of young girls in Yorkshire, England, during the 1970s-’80s) to Rossellini’s artistically-radical, still-moving chronicles of post-WWII life in Italy. As Film Forum’s current Kurosawa retrospective has shown, there are ways of presenting and looking at human experience and art expression that shouldn’t be lost— standards that are easily recovered because examples of our great movie heritage still survive.

This comparison is useful because the Red RidingTrilogy presents the central problem of inferior TV culture taking over from cinema culture.While Rossellini, in the 1940s, innovated ways of presenting contemporary experience by stressing more realistic forms of drama (called Neorealism), contemporary opportunist Michael Winterbottom produced the Red RidingTrilogy as part of his ongoing project to diminish cinema as a thorough, conscientious, imaginative art form to a glib, casual, technology-driven formula. Big on digital video,Winterbottom emphasizes visual frivolity where Rossellini bent documentary-style to melodramatic means in order to achieve a new appreciation of life as lived and as perceived through art.

Rossellini’s genuine sophistication makes an astringent experience of his primarily emotional (spiritual) emphasis on the aroused citizens fighting Gestapo occupation in Open

City, the various Allies’ and civilians’ common suffering in Paisan and the tragic incapacity of youthful understanding in Germany Year Zero. But Winterbottom, choosing the most gruesome and unconscionable of human experiences, employs TV technique to make viewers less thoughtful and less sensitive.The Red Riding Trilogy (asinine reference to the Little Red Riding Hood folktale) has that smartabout-movies attitude discouraging emotional response in favor of snark.

Winterbottom implies that cynicism is fun. He continues the silly romance with film noir that suggests the world is a dark, godless, unsalvageable place—the opposite of how Edgar Wright satirized English provincial corruption in the great Hot Fuzz. Each Red Riding film, set in 1974 (directed by Julian Jarrold), 1980 (directed by James Marsh) and 1983 (directed by Anand Tucker), uses a splintered, time-shifted narrative that absolves audiences from demanding consequence and comprehension; proof that nobody reads Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot or even Dostoevsky (whose Prince Myshkin gets reduced to a sniveling, retarded child molester named Myshkin—a scapegoat that turns us all into idiots).There’s no sustained narrative or conclusiveness such as distinguished Infernal Affairs orThe Godfather trilogy’s morally reflective whole. Despite three different directors, the imagery is TV-trite, distorting reality rather than Rossellini’s inquiry into actuality (memorialized by Anna Magnani’s unforgettable death scene in Open City).

The Red Riding Trilogy mixes cynicism and sarcasm, pandering to the naiveté market no differently than Brick and Zodiac, moving from a smug Yorkshire journalist (Andrew Garfield) challenging a local gangster (the imposing Sean Bean), to a self-doubting police detective (Paddy Considine) and a hapless solicitor (Mark Addy).

This is high drama for people who’ve never been tested, or known real violence or stress. Unlike Rossellini’s trilogy, real life is not reflected in Winterbottom’s folly, other than the superficial political references such as events taking place in the shadow of nuclear power cooling towers as if to indict the Thatcher-era government.This TV-realism is non vs. neo.

Oddly,Winterbottom (whose only good film was 24 Hour Party People, the comic history of Factory Records) uses R&B songs as ironic atmosphere. But removing audience recall of the period’s politically engaged punk or reggae feels dishonest next to the rousing programmatic music Rossellini uses unashamedly.Winterbottom’s approach is trifling, whereas Rossellini’s grand design (though never conceived as a trilogy) encompasses the past and future of human and cultural history. Almost 70 years later, Rossellini’s War Trilogy still reveals life during wartime. Winterbottom merely exploits a cultural fad.