Hey all.
Welcome to another episode of the series Film Fancies here on you’re listening to radio revel. Remember, this is not a movie review, this is me going on about a movie I’ve seen as if I were talking with friends over that coffee at the all-night pancake diner. In this episode, I’m going to go on about the film Saltburn.
Let’s push the elephant out of the room through that door over there. Yes, the main character spends about two minutes near the end of the film dancing through an English country mansion in his birthday suit, yes you get to see all of his parts, yes, it’s kind of sexy, the guy’s got a nice, almost normal body and actually dances pretty well. I didn’t know about this nude scene before I saw the film, my mate told me that everyone knew about it, but I didn’t, and though had I known I would have probably wanted to see the film, I also wanted to see the film just because as well. The nude dance had nothing to do with it.
Well, with that out of the way, I did know that there would be that homo-erotic theme that I don’t think has been properly dealt with in film, something I’ve spoken about from time to time, the bromance thing where two guys just can’t get enough of one another up to the point of, but not usually culminating in sexual contact. Sometimes the two guys are totally straight, sometimes one of them is gay and the other simply “sensitive”. In this case, it’s hard to tell, maybe the main character, Oliver, is gay, maybe he’s just confused, seems like the other guy in the troublesome couple is pretty straight, lots of heterosexual stuff going on with him. In the end though, the bromance thing turned out to be quite secondary to the story, just a common happenstance used as a set up, an oft-used expositional plot device.
It’s hard to talk about this kind of film in detail because many of the details you may want to talk about would potentially ruin the experience for someone who hasn’t seen the film. If you haven’t seen it, though I’m trying to avoid spoilers here, I suggest you stop here, go see the film, then come back and listen to what I’ve got to say about it. Even the two points I’ve made above could have ruined some enjoyment of the movie for some, had it not been that they are pretty much known before anyone sees it (except that I didn’t know about the nude mansion dance!).
What I mean by that is that Saltburn is kind of a run-of-the-mill character-based mystery. You’ve got a Everyman character introduced into a group of extraordinary people living in a relationship bubble of their own making. Once inside that bubble, the Everyman experiences some culture shock, as he doesn’t know the basic logistical rules of being in the bubble (dressing up for dinner, being awakened every morning by a maid drawing back the curtains in his bedroom, serving himself breakfast from a buffet, everything except the eggs), nor does this intruder really know the underlying psycho-dramatic rules (his friend seems to bring people to the estate every summer, always someone different?, the friend’s sister is suicidal but no one wants to talk about it, his friend’s father is mentally unstable though such is treated with a strange respect by those around him).
A series of things happens, from that first seemingly chance encounter that brings the two young men together at university, that first superficial bonding over several rounds of drinks together at the pub, the first sharing when Oliver looks for a shoulder to cry on, the invite to spend the summer with a best friend forever. Not only a The talented Mr Ripley, but also an enigmatic Call me by my name. Let’s throw two young men together who come from different classes, circles, backgrounds, let’s watch them appreciate, even love one another, let’s throw a wrench into the works and watch how they react, not only to the wrench but also to how they react to how the other reacts to the wrench.
Again, though, this film is not about the relationship between Oliver and his posh schoolmate. That’s just another of the tricks used to keep the viewer confused, makes the final reveal more dashing, more romantic, more shocking. Like a good Agatha Christy murder mystery, everyone in Saltburn is exactly the stereotyped character you think they should be until they stop being that stereotyped character, which generally, they don’t: everyone is transparently what you think of them almost from first meeting, except of course, Oliver.
The storyline is not particularly original, it’s been seen in many other films. The characters are not original, they too have been paraded across the screen many times. Even the situations are stock, cliché, been there, done that. I’d just seen The Favourite a couple of days before and as I watched Saltburn, images from the former kept intruding on the latter: the manipulation of sentiments between characters, the hedonistic excesses of the stinkingly wealthy as contrasted with the innocent naivete of the only-middle-class, the ladder climbing and falling from that comes with such contrasts. Even the structure is a borrowed norm, the narration from an after-the-fact point of view of one of the characters with its own little twist.
It is the twist, then, that classifies Saltburn. The picture is not a study of personal relationships. It is also not a movie about class differences. It does not go much farther than to cherry pick standard movie techniques, arguments and characters to tell us a slightly different story. There are some additions which, through their vulgarity, struggle with being an important part of the narrative rather than a click-bait type of material to draw in more spectators. Therein the bathtub scene that is oft talked about, the nude dance, the rape of a gravesite. Interviews with actors seem to be focused on the closed-set filming of this nude scene or takes for that nude dance or if the actor showed himself or a latex version of himself. Such leads me to believe that all that stuff could have been cut from the film, that a bit more attention should have been placed on the story itself.
I enjoyed the film, though there were aspects I found telling, such as Oliver not being able to stomach runny breakfast eggs but being able to do what he does with the draining bath water or his friend’s sister’s menstruation. These maybe could have been better told, with less graphic imagery, perhaps with a deeper dive into the characters themselves, all of whom were, I repeat myself, pretty standard. The rich boy, the rich boy’s bigoted mother, the eccentric father slipping into dementia, the drug addict friend, the suicidal sister, the loyal butler, even the only-seen-twice chamber maid, these were all like primary colors quickly brushed onto the canvas before trying to add the supposedly pastels and mixed colors of Oliver, the only character with a real background, the only character that seems to undergo change, though that change is itself artificial, it was there from the outset, the change became how we perceived Oliver as a person.
Yet, still, it was an okay film to watch, not at all boring, no deep social concepts to digest, just a Christy-like whodunnit that doesn’t have you wishing you’d not paid for the ticket (if you did see it in a cinema!). It didn’t get much past a 6/10 on my scale, it was competent but hardly a masterpiece. Saltburn is good argument for being suspicious of the viral when choosing what to watch on a rainy Saturday afternoon.
Hope I didn’t reveal anything that would destroy your enjoyment of the film. My mate was listening to a film radio program while washing the dishes the other day and the critic began by saying that he wasn’t going to give any spoilers for the film, then explained the main plot from beginning to end in a single sentence. Though that was the plot, though that made my mate look at the film with different eyes than I was using, that such could happen, that a critic would unveil the overall plot, just shows how unimportant the plot was to the movie, how the plot was just another instrument towards some other end that I’m not quite sure was actually achieved.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Film Fancies. Am I in a rut on film types? Not sure, been trying actively to avoid watching things with time-slips, like Monarch, legacy of monsters (there will be no talking of that mediocre near waste of time), or Bodies (liked that one a lot, though it took some brain juice to catch the reason for the final scene in the final episode), or For all mankind, no time slips but rather a relaxed stroll through decades of historical events, a good chance I talk about that one.
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Cheers,
revel.
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