Queer Gaels

Incidentally, this has been my week for meeting Irish people: At Big Chicks Monday night, a foaf introduced me to a native of Lisburn who's fresh from a job teaching philosophy at the same place where monshu studied it, my sister's alma mater of Saint Louis University. Then last night at Jackhammer, I met a poor lost lass also from the Greater Belfast area and helped her find her way to a good dyke bar in the neighbourhood. (Hmm...met them both in pubs, imagine that! And the same foaf was there last night; what does that say?)

Incidentally, the Flesh Hungry Dog Show was well worth it, though due largely to an incredible performance by The Joans. How can you not love a band that not only references the movie Trog but builds an entire song--"Do the Trog"--around it? ("They were doin' the Trog / A million years ago!") If I can figure where in hell The Mutiny is, I may find myself at their next show three weeks from now. (Cub chasers! Check out their adorable little peanut of a drummer, keeping in mind that he's about 100 times cuter IRL. I think I scared him with my enthusiasm, but he was much too polite to show it. I must need lessons from e_ticket in how to comport myself around microcelebrities.)

Forgotten Bob

It's not very often you see for the first time a film that has fascinated you since you were young. I first heard of The Raggedy Rawney back when I was still a teenager. Although the IMDb gives a 1990 release date, it was filmed in 1988. The director, Bob Hoskins, had just captured my attention as the star of Who framed Roger Rabbit? although he'd first pinged my radar two years earlier when I saw a review of his performance in Mona Lisa. (Like this film, a Handmade Films production. Never knew they had such a running association.) So I'm guessing I must've read about the film as his Next Exciting Project. Or did I see a postage-stamp review in the flyer for the local arthouse when it finally played there?

Up until I saw the movie tonight, I didn't think Hoskins had an acting role in it at all, so it was purely the premise that captured my imagination: An army deserter dresses up as a "rawney", or mystical Romany madwoman, to elude capture. I have to say, I imagined a quite different actor in that part than 22-going-on-17 Dexter Fletcher. As it turns out, Hoskins did reserve himself the meaty role of leader of the gypsy band, and the cast is filled out with solid British character actors like Zoë Wanamaker, Ian MacNeice, Gawn Grainger (trust me, you'd know 'em all if you saw 'em), and even Ian "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick" Dury in a bit part.

An unfortunate effect of this is that Zoë Nathenson, as Fletcher's young Romany love interest, is rather out of her depth, playing the part as one would a rebellious Cockney teenager in a contemporary episode of EastEnders. Adding to the feeling of anachronism, there is a distracting alternation between horse-drawn trailers in some scenes and motor caravans in others, presumably due to production problems. (Man, I'd love to read the work diary on this one! Perhaps in Hoskins' memoires one day.)

Nowadays, of course, we'd shrug this off as "postmodernism", especially given the seemingly deliberate indeterminancy of setting. All the speaking actors have English accents--and generally pronounced working-class London ones at that!--and the songs they sing sound like genuine British folksongs. Yet the locales are entirely rural and clearly Central European. (Filmed in Czechoslovakia before that was SOP.) We never discover what nation's army clothes its soldiers in those nondescript brown uniforms which would be almost equally at home in either World War and there's not a scrap of text anywhere to betray the obstensible local vernacular. "That almost works in its favour," monshu pointed out. "It could be any war, anywhere."

All in all, though, it's a surprisingly good film. I was expecting workmanlike direction from Hoskins, but it's at least a cut above that and, I have to say, I agree with most all of his editorial decisions. Wanamaker is as good as I've ever seen her and it's hard to tell where Fletcher ends and his character begins. I didn't think the revenge subplot with Fletcher's former CO is particularly deftly integrated, but it's quickly overshadowed by a satisfying resolution that's far from happy. If I nodded off a bit during the scenes of youthful lovemaking, I can see how necessary they--along with a festive wedding sequence that owes more to British imagination than true Romany tradition--were to balance the overall grimness.

At the end of the day, this is likely to be the best Bob Hoskins film you've never heard of. (I'm taking for granted familiarity with The Long Good Friday, because otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation. Sorry to say, fellow fetishists, but the brawny Bob shower scene in Rawney can't hold a candle to the former film's pièce de résistance. Nonetheless, had I seen it back in 1988, it would've provided fantasy fodder for up till the present day. After all, he has a full Mario moustache! And, in some scenes, he does wears a pair of pants that have my nomination for Best Supporting Actor.)