Women Watching Men Do Bad Things

On BFI's Acting Hard, Antonia Bird's Face, + Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here

Nearly ten years ago, one of my best friends sent us off  down the road to enduring friendship through an unexpected conversational detour. We were talking about crime movies we loved, and the women who were in them, and all manner of things, and I told her that I knew what it meant to date somebody who was looking at spending time in the clink. It didn’t take us long to launch into a string of serious matters from that point, but it was a much more intricate conversation than one based on romantic stupidity. Her naked lack of judgement and the conversation we had that day was the beginning of a pretty wonderful thing. 

At the time, I felt - and I doubt I’ve ever been totally alone here - a little bit alienated by our mostly upper middle-class London peers with their crunchy artistic backgrounds and families who paid their rent while they pursued careers. But I always felt at home with Nia, and I think I instinctively shared a sense that our interests, tastes, lives - things which informed the stories we cared about onscreen and wanted to write about or in Nia’s case make - sometimes felt beyond the realm of middle-class respectability or old-school feminist credentials. We were both in our twenties, and maybe a little bit stifled or abashed by the separation between what we instinctively understood and the high-handed theorising of our colleagues, particularly where masculinity and crime were concerned. 

She understood and was sympathetic to the strange dilemma I found myself in, and while the decision-making was hardly sound on my part, it did give me a unique - at least for the world we occupied - front-row seat to certain things. For instance, the reasons and ways in which incarceration befalls someone; of the cultures and situations which breed crimes petty or violent; and perhaps most of all of the codes and constraints of the type of manhood which bruised its carrier as much as it did those around him. I think Nia and I both had a sense that there was more grey area around these subjects than people from other walks of life wanted to afford them. 

That brings me, in a roundabout way, to my point: that friend, Nia Childs, a filmmaker and programmer, has now curated an incredible film season for the BFI Southbank in London, ongoing until 2 October. Acting Hard explores working-class British masculinity on the screen from the Thatcher era onward. The selection includes everything from Alan Clarke’s hard-bitten borstal drama SCUM (1979) to Bullet Boy (2004) - about a newly-released Hackney jailbird - and Nick Love’s Football Factory (featuring a Q+A with ultimate lad Danny Dyer). Not all of her picks are crime movies, but they’re often adjacent. We both love the genre, of course: what is loving crime cinema if it isn’t being a woman with expertise in watching men do bad things? 

Much of the content of this newsletter has been to spotlight the depiction of women onscreen in traditionally male spaces, and their roles in those criminal underworlds. But in honour of this brilliant BFI season about tough nuts and lads onscreen, curated by a woman (a woman who has long shared the same fascinations about how gender, violence, and crime coalesce as me, to boot) I thought I’d take a look today at two incredible British crime films where women were behind the camera, not in front of it. In a sense, these female filmmakers are doing what Nia & I have been trying to for years, in our own ways, with our shared interests: standing just outside of something vast, and subterranean, and alternately repulsive and thrilling, and taking a closer look at it.

One of those films is the late Antonia Bird’s Face, from 1997, which is screening as part of the Acting Hard season. The other is Lynne Ramsay’s astonishing, elliptical thriller You Were Never Really Here (2017). What both share is a probing, oddly tender look at the parameters of male violence and crime. These filmmakers fundamentally understand that they are looking in at these macho cabals from the outside, and who knows. Maybe that means they find different things to say.

Acting Hard season curator Nia Childs presenting Antonia Bird’s Face at BFI

In Face, Antonia Bird presents to us the sort of film which in retrospect might feel like it’s a part of the 90s trend for flash-bang Brit crime action: Guy Ritchie’s East End heist yarn Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels came the year after. But these East-End heisters are altogether different, mainly because Ray (Robert Carlysle, fantastic and tense as a coiled spring) is a former communist who used to rally and organise with his card-carrying left-wing mother and girlfriend Connie (Lena Headey, now of Game of Thrones fame).Bird’s  filmmaking is beautifully mobile, integrating an eye for operating dynamically in tight spaces and the occasional unbroken tracking shot worthy of a low-budget Marty Scorsese.  It draws a sharp contrast between Ray’s former beliefs and the hopelessness that pervades his stance now as an armed robber. As he says to a younger criminal on the make: ‘Being staunch. Being solid. It’s shit. All of it.’ 

Ray’s rogue’s gallery of accomplices include old stalwart and friend Dave (Ray Winstone, having a hot hand in 1997 which also saw the release of Nil by Mouth), the simple and well-meaning Stevie (Steven Waddington), and the alternately vicious and comic Julian (Phil Davis). The story is pretty simple: someone has betrayed the rest of the crew and stolen their money once the heist is complete. The film is basically an extended allegory on the dichotomy between our social bonds & obligations to one another and the jaded nihilism of the crime world. It’s not difficult to see that if idealists and leftists are on one side of that equation, cynical capitalism is on the other. In the form of Ray’s mother and girlfriend - the feminine presence, but also the leftist one - the possibility of redemption lies. 

The darkness that is vestigial in Face has consumed the protagonist of You Were Never Really Here. Where Ray has a hunted, wired look of constant semi-alarm, commensurate with his anxiety both around being caught and around the morality of what he’s doing, Joe is more physically inert: he moves with the lumbering assurance of a man who has long since detached entirely from the world around him, weighing up the merits of shiny claw hammers in the hardware store. 

That is not to say he is free from trauma and despair: even an innocent group of young women asking him to take a photo of them on the street seems to cause an unpleasant headrush, the camera abruptly zooming in and lurching between their smiling mouths with a discomfort that implies the perverse. Anyone who’s seen You Were Never Really Here knows that Joe is working as something of an extraction expert/contract-killer, in this instance involving secret child sex trafficking rings among dissolute politicians.

It’s not fair, exactly, to suggest that because Bird and Ramsay are women that they might naturally have more stereotypically ‘feminine’ interests or that a slew of male filmmakers have not made self-reflexive, questioning crime films, too. But it is true that both these movies have a good deal more interest in psychological motivation, self-doubt, and the relationships between men and women than many other films of their ilk. 

The relationships in Ramsay’s film are unusual in that there’s practically no male camaraderie to be found. Joe has only his elderly, infirm mother, and the strange accidental friendship of the tween girl he rescues from peril, Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov). Ray, in Face, appears initially to have plenty of male camaraderie, but in truth most of it is false. It’s only his most innocent and childlike male friend - Stevie, who seems to have a learning disability - who can be trusted.  When Ray and Connie reunite, it’s clear that it’s women who are providing the alternative tenderness for these men in distress. 

Equally, there are no punches pulled about the ugliness of those relations at times. Look at the uncomfortable depiction of Dave’s teenage daughter in Face; she’s clearly on the cusp of womanhood, stomping around in cocktail dresses and heels and staying out with her boyfriend all hours. When her boyfriend and her father have a violent run-in, there is something icky about the fact that there is all of this macho entitlement around her whilst simultaneously zero thought for her beyond the selfish brutality they partake in. The ‘protection’ of the men most traditionally designated to do so is brutally reversed, leaving her bereft and traumatised. 

The women in Face still fare considerably better than in Ramsay’s film, where they are killed and abused for the most part, suffering at the hands of violent men who are not answerable to law & order. But in both films, women also serve as a sort of moral backbone, and ultimately, in the form of Connie, literally save the day. (I don’t want to spoil it, but her arrival in her car at a pivotal moment is fundamentally heroic.) It suggests a very optimistic (perhaps fantastical) outlook in spite of a rather gloomy spirit: if enough love and understanding are there, perhaps there really is an alternative for an otherwise prison-doomed soul.

Ditto You Were Never Really Here, in which Joe is constantly fantasising about taking his own life. His suicidal ideation is interrupted by the young Nina: even if this respite is not forever, it is keeping him afloat. That these two films, twenty years apart, are in a strange unwitting conversation with one another is fascinating. It’s rare for a heist or hitman picture with inward-looking qualities not to end fatalistically. And neither film does. You Were Never Really Here concluds with Nina breaking Joe out of his violent fantasies of self-harm with the scalding innocence of the statement that it’s a beautiful day. Equally, Face sees the formation of makeshift family - and of tenderness between men and women - as a possible path out of the storm. As Nia said in her introduction to Face when she presented it earlier this month: ‘Love is the only weapon anyone really has against all manner of social ills. It stops us from being selfish; it asks us to be loyal. It brings joy when things are hard.’ 

Capitulating to the logic of self-interest or fatalism is easy in crime films; it’s practically a default setting. If the conclusion is always that this hoodlum will die or go to prison, you can organise life, your values, your ethics around those two eventualities: it gives some simplicity to matters. When you’re used to watching men self-destruct, perhaps expecting it to happen and resigning oneself is safer. More often than I’d like, as a filmgoer, I have been impressed or satisfied by those endings. (And to be fair, there are many great ones in this vein.) Maybe it’s easier for me to identify with the self-conscious detachment and nihilism of that masculine posture - which is a whole other psychological gordian knot to unpick on its own.

But both You Were Never Really Here and Face ask me to believe something else. Say what you will about gender essentialism, but in traditional crime terms, they take on a very womanly view: they’re about how the world keeps moving. For men, it might be death or prison (That Bird and Ramsay choose neither for their male protagonists is telling). For most women, it’s continuing: living and waiting, prison visits and gravesite mourning, caring for their families while men get to go out in a hail of bullets, or cajoling and hoping for change. Doing all the watching and waiting that Nia and I have spent a decade discussing. (And that her short film from 2021, The Other End, depicts perfectly.) 

You couldn’t say either film has a ‘happy ending’, as such, but they remain optimistic. Both Robert Carlysle and Joaquin Phoenix portray haunted - and hunted - men. And both films are brilliant because they do not foist a false or simplistic happiness at the end. Instead, they ask us to be courageous in the face of moral squalor. To live with our choices and to do better. They ask us to believe that there’s another way. That life goes on.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Acting Hard, a film season on working-class masculinity in British cinema, is at BFI Southbank and streaming on BFI Player now.

Thank you for reading Sisters Under the Mink, a newsletter on women and crime films and TV. Pay remains optional, but if you’d like to provide a little monthly support for what I do, you can upgrade or subscribe below. From now until the end of the year, I’m offering 20% paid subs :)