Week #11 2020: Séance on a Wet Afternoon
Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964; Bryan Forbes). Roll that title over your tongue. Séance… okay yes, spooky… very good… on a Wet Afternoon… blimey, blimey, here we are, the doilies are out, the Battenberg is stale and your milky tea is on its way. Don’t countenance a sherry at this hour, because it’s not coming, especially not in that tweed. This is a British film, for British people. Throughout the history of British film, the industry has always decried being in the shadow of Hollywood, while also failing to establish a truly alternative approach, with some noble and rare sputters (Woodfall, Ealing, Palace, take your bows). Strangely, rather than using our shared language to make unique work ready for export, it’s been more likely (especially during the 1940s and 1950s) that the water flowed the other direction, to diluted British versions of American filmmaking, really only fit for British consumption. On the other hand, there’s something like Séance on a Wet Afternoon, which feels as though it were made by someone who had never heard of an American film, full of stagey nonsense; consistently, it fails to wring drama from its obvious tensions and is delivered to the audience as though seen through a net curtain. Needless to say, I love it.
This all sounds dangerously close to nostalgia, I know. Yet while Séance… came out at the same time that Sean Connery was defining Bond, one year before Alfie and two years before Blowup, you’re never going to be able to buy a merchandise of this misbegotten thing. Avoiding the major cultural touchstones – refusing your Passport to Pimlico, going out of shouting distance of the Angry Young Men – lets you see a different history, and to see different dreams and tensions, one that could never be reduced to soundbites on I Love the 1950s (if such a thing existed). British cinema is full of oddities and dead ends, and what gets incorporated into the canon is just as interesting – and says more about our current moment – than what gets excluded. And there’s every reason to exclude as unsexy a proposition as Séance on a Wet Afternoon. It fits into no movement, bore no successors and barely fits within a genre (too soft for horror, too unconcentrated for thriller, too brittle for successful drama).
Séance on a Wet Afternoon is the story of a married couple, medium Myra (Kim Stanley) and her asthmatic husband Billy (Richard Attenborough) who hold weekly spiritualist meetings. Their regular attendees are a rag tag bunch who gather in silence and leave with only a nod of the head. They could be Rotarians or on a whist drive, but instead, they’re crossing the barrier between living and dead. In order to demonstrate her questionable abilities, they kidnap Amanda, the daughter of a wealthy family in order to later demonstrate her clairvoyance to the police when she ‘finds’ her. Things go awry as Myra loses her grip on reality and pushes Billy to murder the child. He releases her, unbeknownst to Myra. At the climax, Myra’s wishes of being tested by the police come to fruition. She enters a true psychic trance, and discovers that the child is still alive, but in so doing also incriminates herself and Billy.
One of the things that brings me back to this type of film (and exonerates me slightly from a charge of the toxic impulse of nostalgia) is the genuine nastiness mingling with the British cosiness, Cath Kidston with a side helping of cyanide. There’s an interesting tension during this period: British film is keen to show a world returning to the old certainties of class, sex and race, but there’s a strong sense of the return of the repressed, of horrors seeping out and impinging. I once described the plot of Obsession (1949) to a friend who I was trying to sell on coming to my screening of the film. ‘It’s about this man who is cuckolded and kidnaps his wife’s lover and he puts him in a blitzed out basement. Every day he brings a hot water bottle of acid along with prisoner’s sandwiches. All the time he’s tormenting him with the fact he’ll soon kill him and dissolve his body in acid, once he can fill the bath’s worth. It’s brilliant! So funny!’ She did not attend the screening. To describe it, it sounds like a low boil version of Hellraiser. To watch it – replete with cosy conversations in high-backed Chesterfields about the depreciation of the pound, spats about the quality of the martinis being delivered to the captive and its clipped ‘revenge is a dish best served cold’ froideur – it feels closer to a edgy version of Enid Blyton.
Séance on a Wet Afternoon rides the same line between tea cosy and torture instrument. There’s an astonishing scene where the kidnappers sit around and copy edit their ransom note (‘No no, cross that out, we don’t need an introduction.’). Squint at the scenes of Myra and Billy tending to the child while hiding their identity behind surgical masks and you could be watching Les Yeux Sans Visage or even Persona. But the image always rectifies, and anything surreal or unsettling returns to something familiar. For all this domesticity and proximity, it’s not a story of humanising an unthinkable act, helping us understand why kidnappers are willing to do what they do. Even though most of the film is taken up with arguments between husband and wife – like an Edward Albee play if he’d been born in Royal Leamington Spa – it remains brittle, inhuman and unrelatable. It took me a long time to remember on rewatching what the characters’ motives were and what the outcome was.
Without this deeper psychology, your mind focuses on other things. Watching something so untouched by outside influence and at this historical remove, it’s easy to see some of deeper anxieties at play. Fundamentally, the film is a battle between those still living in the shadow of the war and those who are able to forget. Billy and Myra, handmaidens of the dead, are dispossessed, forced to rent their family’s own home while its current owner goes on a package holiday. Britain was in between two realities, between the supposed “never had it so good” ‘60s optimism, and the not-so-distant memory of rationing, the decline of Empire (a dubious source of national pride) and its relatively slow recovery compared to other powers. Billy and Myra’s great, barely repressed tragedy is that they have lost their own child, and so are forced to vampirically steal the youth of Amanda. The details of Amanda’s life tell their own story: snatched from her chauffeur, speeding away in her family’s Rolls Royce, Myra and Billy find her troublingly modern (‘She wants some cocoa and some potato crisps,’ scolds Myra, alien and exotic indulgences as far as she is concerned.) We eventually meet up with her parents when Myra comes to offer her services in refinding the girl. Amanda’s mother, played by Nanette Newman, arrives midway through the film, looking as though she’s just tripped out of Biba, while her husband – sharply suited and ready for the new economy – throws Myra out angry at this intrusion from the darker, irrational currents of England (‘Half an hour we had a man in here who offered to find our daughter with a divining rod.’).
It’s often said that films – like dreams – are useful tools to play out our worst anxieties in safety. That’s a powerful function at a time like this (just look at how keen people are to watch Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) right now). What’s even more soothing is to watch something about anxieties long passed and anaesthetised. While it might make work like this easy to forget – with no ancestral echoes, no family features we can look for today, no electric charge as we extrapolate across time – it also gives us perspective on our current anxieties, that they too shall pass, that we can look at them softened as though seen through net curtains.
(Apologies for no new letter last week; I was working at an event on Sunday, my usual writing day. Stay safe out there, be willing to change your usual routine and check in on your people.)
Recommendations
Richard Hornsey’s The Spiv and the Architect: one of the few academic books I’ve read for pleasure. Inspirational excavation of the subconscious of British post-war culture, and a rebuke to those who’d slather British history in nostalgia. Especially good queer reading of The Lavender Hill Mob.
Steve McQueen’s exhibition at the Tate. I have been thinking about the kind of intimacy he can access with Girls, Tricky since I saw it.
Empress Of’s ‘Woman’ (thanks JR)