murder
Paris By Night A film by David Hare
Review by David Grant She is an ambitious Tory MEP. Beautiful, quick-witted and tough, she is Clare Paige, darling of the ideological hard-right. But she is also a politician with a murky past. It catches up with her at a Conference in Paris. An ex-business partner turns up. He seems intent on exploiting her meteoric rise by extorting money from her in exchange for his silence. It appears that she and her husband offloaded large debts on him under dubious circumstances. To survive she must kill.
Promising stuff, you might imagine. Unfortunately, this attempted investigation into the moral and political world of the Thatcherites falls apart as a result of a totally unbelievable plot.
This is not because the main character is asked to carry out actions that any self-respecting neoliberal would refuse to do. After all, the ex-partner was so weak and venal that he almost had 'Kill Me' etched on his forehead and would have almost certainly died sooner or later of his own account. Anyway, he really should have known better than to tangle with a woman whose lipstick and overcoat were so red as to scream 'Danger' at you from the screen.
And Clare's affair is certainly by no means an unheard of matter
REVIEWS within even the present Cabinet. Indeed, you could speculate that Cecil Parkinson's excess of energy in this regard may yet be harnessed and proposed for privatisation, but what is certain is that it is a matter of public record. And, yes it's true, most of us probably would have drawn the line at screwing with a young lover in Paris while young sonnyboy was undergoing an emergencey operation in London, tended only by his drunken father (give us a break !), but then the point is that people like Clare Paige are thoroughly unpleasant and unscrupulous. But then this is also their fascination. Unfortunately, this is not the central fascination of the plot.
Hare decides to invest Clare Paige with an almost schizophrenic longing to uncover a tender, loving side to her personality, a crisis we are presumably to assume is brought on by her shock at committing murder. The tension thus created is intended to be the motor force for her internal collapse, but the whole project just does not work. Paige's reactions to events become ever more improbable to keep the whole structure of the film afloat. Fortunately for Hare, Charlotte Rampling has been cast in the woman-falling-apart role so many times before that she, at least, seems to know what is going on and why. The rest of us are left with our disbelief decidedly unsuspended.
The centrai problem is that Paige's own particular brand of right-wing individualism is quite sufficiently full of internal contradiction to provide us with combustible material to fuel her downfall. As it is, events which have a disquietingly external feel keep intervening in order push her towards her fate. In the end, therefore, you have a rather reactionary message that here is a woman who overstepped the limits and deserved what she got. The film becomes a judgement of Paige's morals rather than her political philosophy.
In fact, if the film had followed its chosen, if flawed, logic in a stricter fashion. Paige would have survived, indeed, come out triumphant. Such people always manage to suppress their moral dilemmas in the name of self-interest and preservation. Of course they deserve a nasty end, but here this is wishful thinking rather than a logical outcome.
British film makers, it seems, have yet to explore our ruling classes with the incisive gaze that some Italian and German directors have turned on their respective political establishments. Like British social democracy, all we ever seem to get from British 'thrillers' is the timid, ritualised prodding at safe and rather stale stereotypes. It is high time we demanded more from both.