Black Sea

One of the inher­ent joys of watch­ing films made by Kevin Mac­don­ald is his pal­pa­ble rev­er­ence for old movies. His work tends to be lit­tered with sub­tle ref­er­ences, nods to genre and clas­si­cal film­ing tech­niques, and char­ac­ters who could’ve been played by the charis­mat­ic, lens-hog­ging stars of Hol­ly­wood yes­ter­year. Though his lat­est, Black Sea, ven­tures into that age-old (and deeply unfash­ion­able) cin­e­mat­ic cul-de-sac, the sub­ma­rine movie, his key inspi­ra­tion was John Huston’s dust-parched para­ble of man’s inabil­i­ty to resist the lure of filthy lucre, 1948’s The Trea­sure of the Sier­ra Madre.

What’s inter­est­ing and orig­i­nal about this movie is the way it approach­es the theme of greed with­out recourse to pet­ty pol­i­tics and ide­alog­i­cal grand­stand­ing. This is about greed as a uni­ver­sal vice which afflicts the 99 per cent just as deeply as it does the 1 per cent. Jude Law, whose mini career rein­ven­tion as a salty char­ac­ter actor is build­ing up a very pos­i­tive head of steam, takes the lead as Cap­tain Robin­son, a moral­ly forth­right under­sea haulage expert who has been tossed on the scrapheap by his bureau­crat­ic overlords.

Unable to find work which requires his high­ly spe­cialised skill-set, he sits in dingy pubs with his sim­i­lar­ly laid-off bud­dies and con­cocts schemes with which to take down The Man. It’s class war then, and Robin­son locates his sym­bol­ic stone and sling­shot in a cachet of Nazi gold lay­ing unclaimed in neu­tral waters off the coast of the Ukraine. There’s a small win­dow in which he and a team of volatile, pan-eth­nic bud­dies (half British, half Russ­ian) can nab the booty before it’s scooped up by the cor­po­rate nabobs. Enter a decom­mis­sioned antique Russ­ian sub which is pow­ered by des­per­a­tion and a lust for fast cash.

Fol­low­ing a brief nar­ra­tive tee-up, we’re dragged deep under the water­line and that’s where we remain for the bulk of the film’s run­time. Fol­low­ing the ini­tial flur­ry of pos­i­tiv­i­ty that comes from the belief that these men have a real chance to get one over on their evil ex-pay­mas­ters, the mood grad­u­al­ly shifts to one of mild tor­ment, then agi­ta­tion, and even­tu­al­ly extreme vio­lence. Ben Mendelsohn’s Fras­er is deemed from the off to be a major lia­bil­i­ty, though time con­straints mean he’s the only man who can exe­cute the required job. Essen­tial­ly play­ing a light vari­a­tion on the stock Mendel­sohn thou­sand-yard mani­ac role, his counter-intu­itive and antag­o­nis­tic actions are the sole dri­ver of the doom-laden plot.

Like the creaky sub itself, Black Sea has a few mod-cons miss­ing, but most of the time uses restrict­ed resources to its cin­e­mat­ic advan­tage. The cam­era very sel­dom cap­tures the sub from the exte­ri­or, and this dearth of estab­lish­ing shots help to build up a sense of extreme para­noia as well as lock­ing the audi­ence onto the ves­sel. Though this film appears as a barn­storm­ing action caper in thrall to the hey­day of Eal­ing Stu­dios (the seri­ous ones more than the fun­ny ones), it mutates into a weird kind of goth­ic hor­ror para­ble which clev­er­ly presents rabid con­sumerism as always being to the detri­ment of oth­ers. And Law’s Scot­tish accent is total­ly awesome.