A new Billy Elliot?
By Nick Curtis, Evening Standard
15 April 2004
Every now and then, a British film gets it right, capturing a truth about the world we live in, along with the audience's imagination. Billy Elliot was one, East is East another, and the latest, arriving on our screens next week, is Paul Morrison's Wondrous Oblivion. The story of a cricket-mad Jewish boy in pre-Swinging Sixties London, it shares more with its chart-topping cinematic predecessors than quaint period detail and a coming-of-age story. For, at its core, Wondrous Oblivion, like Billy Elliot and East is East, is about that most English of virtues - tolerance.
David Wiseman (played by Sam Smith, the preternaturally poised star of Alan Bleasdale's 1999 adaptation of Oliver Twist for the BBC) is caught between several worlds.
To his middle-class, gentile schoolmates on the cricket pitch he's a dreamy oddball, an enthusiast with all the gear - whites, pads, bat signed by the Surrey side - but with no idea of how to play.
To his fellow Torah scholars at the temple, he's a dreamer wasting his life by recreating famous matches with his collection of cigarette cards. And to the working-class families with whom he shares a terraced street in south London - their faces curdling at the guttural accents of his German mother and older Polish father - David is simply a "yid".
All this changes, though, when a cheery, breezy Jamaican, Dennis (Delroy Lindo), moves his family in next door and promptly uproots the backyard roses to erect a cricket net. From Dennis and his daughter Judy, David learns how to bat, bowl and field. But the change in attitudes of those around him wakes David from his "wondrous oblivion", alerting him to the insidious, shifting nature of prejudice, and the fact that it has wormed its way into his own soul.
GIVEN the current climate, where heightened international tension has allowed more- or- less open racism to leak back into public discourse, it is heartening to note how many recent, successful British films have celebrated cultural diversity. Damian O'Donnell's East is East, Metin Huseyin's Anita and Me, and Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham focused on the subtle and fruitful exchange of cultural values between immigrant and indigenous populations.
Billy Elliot may have been pretty much all white, but its message of tolerance, for miners' sons with a passion for dance, or for other men, was a celebration of difference.
Even Richard Curtis's Love Actuallyas blandly homogenised a portrait of bourgeois London life as you are likely to see, contained a couple of non-white faces, after the director was vilified for portraying Notting Hill as an Aryan enclave.
Wondrous Oblivion was a labour of love for Paul Morrison, a TV drama director and documentary maker who was "just about born" when the Windrush passenger liner dropped the first wave of Caribbean immigrants into London at Tilbury Docks in 1948. "It was a very personal project, although David is not me in any literal sense," says Morrison. "About the only thing I share with him is that I'm pretty useless at cricket." Aspects of Morrison's own childhood did, however, inform the movie.
He grew up in north London in a "semi-demi-observant" family of Russian anarchist Jewish refugees: even though his parents weren't overly religious, they helped to found the Hendon Reform Synagogue to ensure that Morrison socialised with other Jewish children. The secondary school he attended had in those days a "Jewish quota", and the teachers indulged in offhand anti-Semitism. "They'd say the Jews had themselves to blame for the Holocaust because they didn't defend themselves," he recalls.
He befriended the lone Asian boy at the school, and remembers the first black family moving into his grandparents' street in Cricklewood in the 1960s, and his grandmother's sudden fear of how their gentile neighbours would react. "I think I always had a finely tuned antenna for prejudice after that," says Morrison.
After studying at Cambridge and the Royal College of Art, he worked in current affairs for the BBC before making documentaries for Channel 4.
"I realised I had been quite dismissive of my Jewishness when I was younger," he recalls, "so I did a series called A Sense of Belonging, about British Jewish identity, which was really designed to answer the question of why I hadn't been interested in it."
His researches led him to the story of anti-Semitic riots in - of all places - the Welsh valleys in 1911 which, in turn, led to his first feature film, Solomon and Gaenor, in 2000. His two sons, then aged nine and 15 (he also has an older daughter with his psychotherapist wife Barbara) then insisted he make a film that they could enjoy, and so began his search for backers for Wondrous Oblivion.
In a piece of serendipity too preposterous even for Hollywood, a breakthrough in the script ("a happy ending rather than a bittersweet one!") coincided neatly with the nomination of the Welsh- language version of Solomon and Gaenor for the 2001 Best Foreign Film Oscar. "Suddenly three entities were vying to fund Wondrous Oblivion."
THE finished film beautifully captures a tipping point in British cultural history: the shift from the drab, buttoned-up Fifties to the more free, multicultural society of the Sixties is flagged by the increasing use of reggae and ska music in the soundtrack, and by a final appearance by David's mother, played by Emily Woof, in jeans rather than her usual clingy tea dresses. "I wanted to show that not all Jewish mothers were homely, matronly and round," Morrison smiles. The film also feels timely, not just because cricket is in the headlines thanks to Brian Lara's recent, record-breaking 400, but because the debate on immigration is at a pitch of frothing ferocity unmatched since Lord Tebbit said newcomers to these shores should undergo a "cricket test" to see where their national loyalties lay.
So, was Morrison out to preach a doctrine of tolerance? "It wasn't my ambition to do that, but it comes out in my writing because that's what I believe," he says. "We need to enjoy our differences rather than be frightened of them."
His film is a testament to the fact that, essentially, we are all the same. Young Sam Smith, for instance, is half-Jewish and non-practising, and had to learn Hebrew and cricket to play David. Delroy Lindo is of Caribbean extraction and lives in America, Emily Woof is neither Jewish nor German, and Stanley Townsend, who plays screen husband Victor, is a Dublin Protestant
"Well, I do look Jewish," Townsend told me after a screening of the film. "And if a Dublin Protestant can play a Polish Jew it sort of proves Paul's point that we're all basically the same, doesn't it?" It does indeed.
• Wondrous Oblivion - uk release on 23 April.
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Wondrous Oblivion (2003) (Read 6,154 times)
