Red Road
Andrea Arnold

Dan Sumners
posted 20 April 2007

Red Road, directed by Andrea Arnold, is the first of three films under the 'Advance Party' banner of Lars von Trier, which will see the same actors playing the same characters in each. Von Trier has said that ‘a film should be like a rock in the shoe’, an uncomfortable and challenging experience, a description that Red Road lives up to.

The film centres around Jackie, a CCTV operator in Glasgow, and an example of how the growth in public surveillance has been entered into without proper consideration of its social effects, both on the watched and the watchers. After catching a glimpse of someone she wasn't expecting to see - Clyde - Jackie begins to develop an obsession with tracking his every move, and to the detriment of those she is charged to protect.

The vast banks of screens, and the ease with which Jackie flips between them to track her quarry, starkly depict a society that already exists, yet if you were to follow the mainstream debate and commentary on the issue of surveillance you would be forgiven for believing that it is little more than nascent. 'Big Brother' is indeed here. Human activity is reduced to washed out images and muted interplay, scenes in a film with no direction until Jackie and her colleagues bestow some upon it. Is this a metaphor for Red Road itself? Perhaps.

The meat of von Trier-related productions is relationships between characters, between actors, between actors and their director. Yet relationships in any film are only presented to us as the director sees fit. However long an actor stays in character, or to whatever extent they become the character, the audience will only ever see what the director decides they will see. When Jackie's obsession with Clyde leads to her failing in her duty, it is the realisation that she has fallen to directing her own film that snaps her back to reality, if only for a short time.

The director decides what has import, what carries weight and what adds something to the film. They conjure a narrative. Do politicians, historians, teachers do anything different?

Jackie doesn't stay at her station, but acts upon the illicit information she has gathered and approaches Clyde. The overwhelming feeling, hinted at throughout the first half of the film, is that this man is guilty and that Jackie formed a justifiable objective at the moment she saw him on camera. Yet, as she keeps her distance, slowing moving from CCTV room, to estate, to Clyde's flat, this feeling begins to shift from distrust of him to distrust of the initial conclusion we were urged to draw.

It is not a new device to lure an audience in one direction, only to have them make an abrupt volte face in the final twenty minutes. But this isn't what Red Road does. Rather, it demonstrates that every individual is secretly directing their own film, constructing their own narrative, and that this can lead to not only ignorance but pure and simple error. There is no great shock, no twist; the story merely unfolds first from the point of view of Jackie, and then from that of objective truth. The realisation is not ours, but Jackie's, and we are asked to consider her position for ourselves.

After being presented with the fact of CCTV in the UK, being made to confront the fact that we are being watched, we become the watchers, following Jackie as she plays out her obsession. The decisions she makes, although somewhat understandable, are clearly the result of an unbalanced state of mind. She snatches at anything that seems clear to her, but in the process is herself confronted with the reality of the consequences. She too passes from watcher to watched, but it is herself that she is watching. She begins to experience her own life again.

Although the characters of both Jackie and Clyde are billed as leading, this film is really about Jackie as far as characterisation and story are concerned. But the film’s import concerns the irrationality of the human condition, of our internal narrative, of acting on imperfect information. A human being can want something so much that they believe it is so, and in the process do not only others but themselves a disservice.