The Times bfi
London Film Festival 2004

Ground Zero, as seen from the Art House
The Time We Killed
Jennifer Todd Reeves
Yes
Sally Potter

Toby Marshall

The attacks of September 11 2001 and their aftermath have inspired a diverse range of productions at this year's London Film Festival. At one end of the cultural spectrum Jonathan Demme's engaging remake of The Manchurian Candidate presented a mainstream commentary on Bush's War on Terror. At the other end, two art house directors offered personal and more heavily stylised responses to 9/11 and what followed.

The Time We Killed is a partly autobiographical account of agoraphobia. And whilst the film was conceived before the attack on the Twin Towers, it works in Bush's response as a significant theme. Its already fragile central character finds that the aftermath of 9/11 confirms all her worst fears about the world from which she has retreated. Yes was written the day after 9/11, but addresses the event more obliquely. It is the love story of two individuals, one Arab, one American, who also find modern Western life intolerable. They too find sanctuary, not in their homes, but on the more pacific shores of Cuba.

Of the two films, Yes has the more conventional narrative. Joan Allen plays an Irish-American scientist with a romantic side, who lives in England and researches foetal development. She lives in a loveless, childless and faithless marriage with her brutally disinterested drone of a husband Anthony (Sam Neill). When she meets a charming Beirut-born doctor (Simon Abkarian), who is working in London as a chef and waiter, an affair is quickly initiated. Initially, they find that their differences are a source of mutual attraction. He's got bagloads of oriental exoticism, whilst she represents the epitome of occidental wealth and rationalism. Yet as they become increasingly interdependent, and the emotional stakes are raised, they find that the pressure makes them retreat into defensive and antagonistic cultural positions. He reads her as a proto-imperialist, she reads him as an unreconstructed Eastern patriarch.

By contrast, Lisa (Robyn Taylor) in The Time We Killed has difficulty establishing any relationships, hostile, loving, or otherwise. For some time she has led a reclusive existence in her small tenement apartment. Her only real contact with the world comes from the snatches of muffled and mostly grotesque conversations that drift into her apartment from the surrounding apartments, as well as the occasional awkward visit from her narrow circle of friends.

Mostly she spends her time masturbating, completing a line or two of the book she has been commissioned to write, and recalling her significantly more interesting past. In particular, she is fixated by the memory of her Tomboyish ex-lover, who sadly died of cancer, but retains in death a greater presence in the world than the lover she left behind. Lisa's misanthropic view of the world is only confirmed by what she watches on television, the one channel of communication she keeps constantly open. When she sees one of President Bush's actual addresses to the nation all her fears are confirmed. She quips 'Terrorism got me out of the house, the War on Terror got me back inside.'

Both films have some appeal at the level of form. Whilst Yes relies rather too heavily on cheap-looking motion effects, which sadly make it feel student-like, its method of narration is especially noteworthy. Not because of the structure of its speech - it's mostly written in iambic pentameter - but for the wayit shifts between internal and external dialogue. This trick neatly conveys the inner conversations its characters have as they speak to others. Likewise The Time We Killed makes interesting use of a stock and medium that will soon become extinct. It was shot using high-contrast 16mm black and white film, which recalls American experimental film of the 1970s. This, combined with its anti-realist editing strategies, makes for some captivating and impressionistic, if retro, depictions of America.

But whilst both films have moments of aural or visual appeal, the content is lacking. Yes features scenes that show real potential, but its main characters too often feel like personifications of theoretical positions within Cultural Studies, rather than real living individuals. Consequently, Potter's multiculturalist diagnosis - apparently mutual respect will solve our crisis - carries little cinematic weight. Similarly, The Time We Killed doesn't really have great deal to say about the killing we are doing. And by the time its self-obsessed central character resolves to leave her flat and do something about the world and the people who so disgust her we have lost all interest.

For all its faults, Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate comes more highly recommended. It's brash, it's very Hollywood and the conspiracy theory it advocates credits the Neocons with far too much intelligence. That said, Denzel Washington's superb central performance will drag even the resistant spectator into a Michael Moorish world of fear and paranoia.