Colour
So it’s five minutes past St David’s Day and so we really should
take the opportunity to peek at a couple of Welsh movies, visit the land of my
birth, the land of my fathers. It’s time to pin on a daffodil and type
furiously whilst singing ‘Sospan Fach’ at an irritatingly high volume. Actually
compared to the other corners of the British Isles, Welsh cinema exists in the
kind of shallow pool that your average algae would move out of seeking somewhere
more spacious. Whereas Scotland has some undoubted classics (‘Local Hero’,
‘Trainspotting’), Northern Ireland a whole series of films inspired by the troubles
(most recently the hugely impressive ‘Good Vibrations’) and Ireland was given a
grand cinema tradition by John Ford which it either embraces or pushes
violently against – the Welsh shuffle nervously at the edges, occasionally
lobbing something forward before scuttling back to hide behind the settee
again.
Which makes the ambition of ‘The Carmarthen Circus of
Curiosities’ all the more impressive. If you can imagine a magic-realist Mike
Leigh movie, with a fantastically bright palate, dream sequences full of
brilliantly crummy special effects, the occasional Welsh folk song, Catherine
Zeta-Jones pouting in a tiny outfit, while Ruth Madoc sports a beard – then you
have something approximating ‘The Carmarthen Circus of Curiosities’. This is a
magical and ambitious movie, but also a provincially small Welsh film that
thinks nothing of having whole scenes where characters just pass the time of
day in almost incomprehensible Wenglish. It’s a day in a life of this extra special
circus, which never travels anywhere, but has the world come to it. It’s the
trials and tribulations of its performers, where nothing really happens beyond
everyday moments of drama. It’s an odd film, which like laverbread is far from
everybody’s tastes, but some people genuinely love.
We have Jonathan Pryce as the ringmaster, pattering away in
a gorgeous singsong accent, and using force of personality to dominate the ring
and the world around it. If you ever needed someone to lead a group of
stilt-walkers into war, Pryce would be your man. There’s Owen Teale as the
circus strongman who can lift any weight placed in front of him (including, as
we see in montage, a double decker bus, a rather startled looking rhinoceros
and a picnic table full of pensioners who don’t let such an occurrence
interrupt their tea). The object of both their desires is Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Words are not adequate to describe how ravishing la Zeta-Jones looks in this
movie, dressed as she is mostly in a tiny black bikini, underneath a glittering
almost sheer wisp of material – both of which seem to fluctuate in size and
shape from scene to scene. To be honest it’s a ridiculously poorly written role
which doesn’t require much more than pouting and smiling, and could no doubt
have been played by a slightly more expressive than normal shop mannequin. It’s
an odd use then for this future Oscar winner’s talents, although in the post
‘Darling Buds of May’ lull she was probably just happy to get the work.
(Allegedly though, this is the first film in which Michael Douglas ever
glimpsed her). Elsewhere we have Michael Sheen as the skinny stable boy, a very
young Ruth Jones as his comically curvy squeeze and Antony Hopkins deigning to cameo
for about for about twenty seven seconds as local gentry who is entranced by it
all. While narrating the whole thing we have Ruth Madoc, in the only role I’ve
ever seen her in outside of ‘Hi-De-Hi’, wearing the kind of luxurious and
voluminous beard you could easily hide geese in.
If anything represented The Tafia in action, it’s this film. I
think it’s marvellous, a real psychedelic treat. This is a motion picture I
love dearly, but undeniably it’s an example of the Welsh film industry taking
careful aim and shooting itself in the foot. As let’s be fair, it’s difficult
to see where a large audience for such a film would come from. Yes it looks
great, yes it is in parts brilliant – but soap opera mixed with Angela Carter,
performed by a cast determined to exaggerate their Welsh accents to ludicrous
effect, is not the kind of movie that will get them queuing around the block at
the multiplex. I’m sure even at Cineworlds in Rhyl, Aberystwyth and – yes –
Carmarthen, seats would have been very easy to come by.
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