Grainy and gritty colour, tinged by relentless Welsh rain
A teenager is hiding out in the woods. We open with him sat high in a tree, close to the bark, his eyes narrowed like a hawk’s. Before long a couple pass by underneath, a young man and younger woman. The man is leading her by hand and doing all the talking. His voice is light and fruity, it is posh, it is English. Seriously, it is English beyond the point of parody, the kind of English voice Bertie Wooster would deem a bit ‘plummy’. The teenager crouches close to the branches as they go past. It’s not long before the couple stop and the man lays her back, he is still talking, still impressing her with his accent and his breeding. He talks and talks, even when he is taking her clothes off. She only says one word and that is “Diolch”, Welsh for ‘Thank you’. Clearly it’s a signal, as the teenager leaps from the tree and expertly slits the man’s throat. The girl smiles at him the whole time, moving swiftly from coquettish to really turned on.
And so begins ‘Pont-Y-Clun’ a Welsh horror/thriller/love story: the tale of two murderous young lovers, ‘Badlands’ with an asbo and acting lessons from ‘Pobol-Y-Cwm’. Gwilliam is a young lad with a bad reputation, one who has been driven out of his local town (unnamed in the film, but presumably the small South Wales town of Pont-y-Clun – home to a pub called ‘The Isambard Kingdom Brunel’, which is the only thing I know about it). However even though he is despised and loathed by the townsfolk, so much so that even his parents spit to the ground when they refer to him, he is loved by one person. Nubile and lovely young Delyth Parry, who helps him make ends meet, by luring young English tourists into the nearby woods so that Gwilliam can kill them, steal their clothes, take their money and – gulp – it’s hinted, eat them. Eventually the pile of bones of dead Englishmen gets so high that even the Welsh police have to investigate.
(Interestingly, Gwilliam, with his shock of red-hair and NHS glasses, looks like a grown up Norman Price from Welsh TV’s ‘Fireman Sam’. Given how naughty Norman Price is in ‘Fireman Sam’, maybe this film serves as a warning from the future. Unless Norman is taken in hand, his hometown of Ponty-Pandy will also find itself piled high with the corpses of dead computer generated Englishmen.)
There’s a very amusing moment, when local Detective Inspector Owen Teale (appearing on this blog for the second time this week) sighs and says that six dead Englishmen is just too many. It gives the impression that three or four dead Englishmen would be well within acceptable levels, but really Gwilliam is being greedy by going for half a dozen. I like this film, it’s taut and well made, and really understands the trick that suggested violence is the most horrific – but the anti-English flavour of it means that it was never going to travel easily over the border. Gwilliam even makes it clear he would never kill real people, ie. the Welsh; while Delyth ponders how weird it would be to have actual sex with an Englishman. (The film also isn’t helped by the fact that – in the version I saw – some of the Welsh language scenes aren’t subtitled, making it seem like some strange private joke against English speakers). So even though I like this movie, it sums up one of the main things I dislike about Welsh culture: namely, the incredibly chippy need to punch upwards. It’s an attitude that exists in TV, films, local news and even just talking to people on the street or in the pub, that identification as the poor, trodden down underdog who has to hit out at the big bully, even though that particular big bully has long since stopped paying attention. A little bit of nationalistic banter is fine, but Welsh nationalism – certainly as far as the English are concerned – has a real aggrieved nastiness to it that never seems particularly justified. Let’s be fair, the good people of Llantrisant, Llanelli and Llandaff may hate the English; but the good people of Leeds, Leicester and Luton are more likely to be baffled by it than share the animosity.
By the time the police enter the woods we are in Rambo territory, with do and die for the two young lovers, desperate to hang onto each other even as their murderous world falls apart. This is a film like its central character, it’s rude, overly aggressive and suffers from alarming xenophobia, but like redheaded Gwilliam it’s not totally impossible for someone to love – or at least, appreciate – it.
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