Those rather dreading old age and possible decrepitude might be tempted give RADIATOR a miss. But that would be a shame as Tom Browne’s honest, touching and often painful work is a gem of understated but powerful filmaking. Set in a suitably autumnal Lake District, we enter the home of Leonard and Maria, an aged couple living alone in an isolated farmhouse. Their creaking home makes Miss Haversham’s parlour look like the Ideal Home Exhibition. It is a powerful portrait of decay, neglect and chaos; a visceral metaphor for what can happen when a long life comes to bite us on the neck.
In what is essentially a three-hander, the plot turns around a visit by the couple’s son Daniel (Daniel Cerquiera) up from the big city to try to help what is a family crisis. Old Leonard, housebound and rickety, has taken to the sofa and refuses to budge. Physically soiled and mentally bruised, the old chap fights against the help that his son has come to proffer. Leonard is played by the late and much lamented Richard Johnson; there’s that marvelously mellifluous bass voice, those craggy features and star quality characterisation. He is wonderfully supported by the evergreen star Gemma Jones, as the repressed wife, mother and usual carer.
In Johnson’s hands, Leonard is more to be pitied than reviled.
Maria and Leonard are fierce, dotty and set in their ways more permanently than a sword in a stone. Leonard is, and probably always has been, a bully of the first order; used to getting his own way, and fastidious about the tiny details of life but blind to the big, important things like love, tenderness and fatherly compassion. In a whole series of finely and beautifully choreographed scenes, we start to make all the connections needed to fill in the back story of this family’s life. Browne is an absolute master of visual narrative and is quite happy to juxtapose a truly funny scene with that of crushing tragedy.
Both Johnson and Craven give performances of their lives – sadly one of the last for the 86 year-old Johnson. As Maria, she is all pointless busy-ness – a lifetime of knowing how to avoid true emotional conflict. The camera catches her in the most private of moments when despair almost (but not quite) breaks through. Johnson is magisterial – capturing both his character’s manipulative bullying and a scarcely perceptible sliver of human warmth. In Johnson’s hands, Leonard is more to be pitied than reviled. Cerquiera plays the not-so-prodigal son with doe-eyed charm and vulnerability. There is a pitch-perfect scene where his true feelings about his decaying parents come to the fore during an informal French lesson – a truly brilliant idea executed with the minimum of detail.
RADIATOR is a beautifully acted and quite mesmeric new film. It is not an easy watch, but it’s one that will repay the viewer in so many unexpected ways.
RADIATOR screens on 9 September at 9pm.
httpvh://youtu.be/dv9qaCqznas