Typist Artist Pirate King

 

New Carol Morley film based upon Audrey Amiss released by Modern Films on Friday 27th October 2023

Carol Morley is one of Britain's most creative film-makers and yet she remains for the most part unknown to the mainstream film watching public. From her debut feature, she has navigated a career of unique features building upon real life stories, autobiographical content and the role of women in modern society. This is not a filmmaker looking to the past to explain the now, this is the here and now, best to understand it as best you could.

Her influence for the new feature is the similarly unknown avant-garde artist, Audrey Amiss (Monica Dolan) whose diaries inspired Morley's film. Incorporating the tropes of the road trip genre as Amiss seeks recognition for her career, she convinces her psychiatric nurse Sandra Panza (Kelly Macdonald) to escort her back to where it all began with many a diversion in place.

Amiss documented her experience of the world and how she saw it through the prism of her own self-proclaimed lunacy; this is a road trip between an eccentric and a reluctant chauffeur.

What is so pleasing about the this film - apart from obviously passing the Bechel Test - is that you get two top notch performances at the helm of the film. Dolan, so often the ensemble player and erstwhile supporter, is given free rein to go for glory and she sinks her teeth into the role of Amiss with aplomb and relish. From the outset, she plays her as a firebrand and rebel and yet one who has been misunderstood for much of her adult life and artistic career.

The partnership of Dolan and Macdonald is key to the film's success and how it will translate to the mainstream, how refreshing to see a film led by two females and in Macdonald returning from Hollywood, willing to play second fiddle to Dolan's lead. The medium shot set-up of the two head on as they drive on their road trip is indicative of this partnership in a moving vehicle, the fondness for the two initially frosty is slowly one where warmth grows similar to that of Jimmy and the Duke in Midnight Run. 

NB (I as a male writer realises this is stupid to write and compare this to an all-male bond when the ultimate companion to this film would be Thelma and Louise surely, where both women's roles alter from the film's beginning and find themselves upon the journey.)

As they drive around, the everyday people they encounter become conduits or people from her past who Amiss use to vent her frustrations with her misgivings and incidents. The constant conflict and unease Amiss creates could be unnerving were it not for the performance of Dolan who incorporates equal rage and equal vulnerability.

The story untangles as more about Audrey's past culminating in the admission that she suffered a major fall when she was 19 leading to her mental health issues and the estrangement between her and her sister Dorothy (Gina McKee) who is the ultimate goal of the journey.

Interspersed with pictures/drawings from Amiss' extensive archive and featuring music she would have wholeheartedly approved of upon the soundtrack, this is a call to arms of a film questioning roles of female artists in general and the biases we may have towards those with mental health issues, everyone is capable of something and that the support they receive is what matters. 

A winning formula with strains of British film-making history from the absurdity of Audrey hitting upon an Anglo-Saxon v Viking re-enactment which smacks of Monty Python to the influence of Ken Russell in the melding of an artist's life with dramatisation, this is a film shot with a softness and a kindness to the crippling nature of mental health, Morley should be applauded for this film that is sympathetic and energetic to a character she is quite fond of.

This is a film that should be commended and enjoyed by a wider audience.

TYPIST ARTIST PIRATE KING is released in UK/Ireland cinemas on Friday 27th October.