Dir: Paul Tickell
With: Nick Moran, Neil Stuke, Kate Ashfield, Mel Raido, Sophie Knijff, Shirley
Anne Field, Mattia Sbragia
89 mins, Cert 18
A determined attempt to film BS Johnson's best-known, or anyway least obscure
novel, published in 1973. Paul Tickell directs in the punky,
bloody-minded-spirit of Derek Jarman and Lindsay Anderson. Nick Moran is
Christie, a thin-lipped no-hoper living with his Alzheimer's-stricken old
mum, Shirley Anne Field. Pissed on by the world, Christie is inspired by his
evening class in accountancy to devise a personal double-entry book-keeping
system in which he will record his revenges against life in the "credit"
column.
The movie, like the novel, gives a plausible natural history of the
anarcho-terrorist's victim-mentality mindset. Christie's story is wackily
interleaved with the 16th-century history of double-entry book-keeping's
inventor: Fra Luca Bartolomeo Pacioli, a double-entry narrative device which
doesn't however cast much light on Christie. The rest of the movie however
can't decide if it's a period-piece about the shabby filing-clerk world of the
1960s, or an up-to-the-minute 21st century world of computer laptops, with
flashes of fantasy violence in the office - Lock, Stock meets Ally McBeal.
There is certainly something apt about the tatty and depressing Britishness of
the film, but it's difficult to tell how deliberate this is. This release is
happening alongside an important season of BS Johnson's own short films at
London's lCA cinema. The best of these, You're Human Like the Rest of Them
(1967), is Johnson's startling precursor to Anderson's If. . .
Peter Bradshaw