We have been negatively conditioned into expecting way too much from our filmmakers. If a director doesn’t deliver a new movie on the dot of two years since the last one, then snipey little rhetoricals are floated into the digital ether. “Whatever happened to X?”, “I wish Y would hurry up with a new movie!”, “Hey Z, u OK hun?” Some might even think that our obsession with artists and their erratic work rates occasionally border on the psychotic.
Alice Lowe, whose new film Timestalker is a wondrous, psychologically profound exploration into the mindset of the romantic obsessive, feels that the content-hungry commentariat have little sense of the hurdles that need to be leaped before a film can come into glorious fruition. When she made her micro-budget debut, Prevenge, in 2016, she had one child and managed to work them into her production and promotional activities. This time around, she has two, and they’re both a bit older and require more attention. She talks about her experience attending film festivals and the types of people who can plunge time and resource into taking such jaunts: “You’re with directors who are men on the whole and they’ve got children but they’re just not with them. This is really difficult to navigate if you are the primary carer for your children. It’s tricky.” She then deadpans, “This is why it’s good that I only do a film once every seven years.”
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Obviously, as professional consumers of culture, it’s hard for a journalist not to want their appetite constantly whetted. But in the case of Lowe, Timestalker is, to use the old cliché, a labour of love, one which has been shaped in a very specific and personal way – and that nurturing takes time. In this case, the Covid pandemic added to the delays, but it’s still sad that a vision so unique and fully-realised would take so long to reach our screens. “After lockdown I was thinking I won’t ever get to make another film. A lot of female directors never get to make a second film.” The film addresses the idea of our endless striving to reach something that always remains just out of reach, with the only respite coming through death. “I definitely had a feeling to make this one about mortality,” she says. “I treat it as if this is my last chance. The whole thing is a big metaphor for filmmaking.”
Lowe herself plays the hapless Agnes, a witty, kindly woman with a distinct set of predilections and who exists across a number of temporal planes – the Dark Ages, the Victorian era, Ancient Egypt, the early 1980s. Her desperate yearning for a very specific type of romantic love leads to, at best, constant disappointment, and at worse, skull-cracking violence. It’s a film whose clever conceit initially raises many questions (and many big laughs) before all the various strands coalesce into something that is at once playful, poetic and emotionally rigorous. “I’ve seen people do bad things for love, and it drives you mad,” says Lowe. “You’ve told them not to do something and they keep doing it, giving your friend advice and they keep going back to their awful boyfriend or whatever, and it drives you insane. Yet you can have a type of admiration for someone who’s crazy because they actually have a belief system, and we’re in a world where we don’t have religion anymore. It’s not the focus of the western world, so what do you lose through that?”
Certainly, Agnes makes for a morally abstruse lead: she’s prone to bouts of violence; she’s blind to the people who actually love her; and she cannot help but make the same mistakes over and over and over again. Yet the film proves that her antisocial tendencies don’t necessarily lead to instant alienation and revulsion. The hackneyed impulse of moaning about an “unlikable character” is, nine times out of 10, moaning about a complex character, or someone who doesn’t just embody the platitudes presented by a genre or type of film. “I think a misconception I sometimes get from people is that they think I want to make weird stuff,” explains Lowe. “I think I’m more populist than I’m given credit for. I actually want people to see my work. I want people to enjoy it. I’m really audience focused. I started out in live performance – theatre, comedy – and I like to know the audience are having a good time and have felt something and gone through a process. So part of me does want to make that Back to the Future – I do want to make something timeless.”
That sense of timelessness comes from the decision not to have a McGuffin or some conceited reason why Agnes is having a string of very bad dates across multiple millennia. Instead, the story was inspired by ideas and concepts that are already common and have taken root in the world, things that actually mean something to the everyday viewer. “I did lots of research into different faiths, religions and their thoughts about karma and reincarnation,” explains Lowe. “I really wanted to make something where I felt the characters are not stereotypes – they are more archetypes. I love things like Commedia dell’arte, and clowning. There’s lots of references to Tarot in the film.” From a cinematic vantage, two gods of British film were very important when it came to Lowe’s sharping of her eccentric vision: “I love Powell and Pressburger, they were a massive influence on this. I was thinking how to get British films back to the sense of colour and magic. It comes down to belief, I think. It’s a belief in something, even if it’s not religious.”
In both Prevenge and Timestalker, Lowe plays characters who are trying to cloak their true identity and present to the world what they feel to be a more socially acceptable and genteel guise. “Loads of it is about identity,” she says, “with someone wearing disguises and going against the very obvious identity of, say, being a pregnant woman who’s taking control of who she is or who she wants to be.” Identity and performance are inextricably linked in terms of this idea of everyday roleplaying, and Lowe sees Timestalker as an example of the audience “roaming around someone’s brain.” In fact, it’s her brain if she’s being honest. “It’s my memories and it’s my fantasies,” she admits. “And it’s a collection of experiences and influences about cinema and what beauty is and what romance is – all these classic tropes. All of these come down to the soul and memories and dreams – an interior world. And the question I have to ask at the end of all of this is, are we going to be allowed to make these films in the future? I do hope so.”
This note of reticence, often laughed of nervously, crops up repeatedly in our conversation – the idea that Lowe may never get to make one of “her” films again. And questions of identity crop up once more, this time in relation to art itself. There’s so much eyeball-harvesting “content” out in the world, and the majority of it is made without the personal signature that serves to make something special and worthwhile. TV, in particular, is in a bad place, with massive shows written by 50 diferent people and AI making its unwanted incursions into the field of creativity. “It’s a sense of quirky identity,” is how Lowe describes it when pressed, “because that’s perceived as a risk – to really say you like something and not caring whether other people like it too”
