Arca­dia

“It is a coun­try which for cen­turies has enjoyed a spe­cial fame, and there’s nowhere like it on Earth!” Well, quite. These words, plucked from a tweed­i­ly patro­n­is­ing ​’50s doc­u­men­tary and placed square­ly at the begin­ning of Paul Wright’s frag­men­tary archive-footage odyssey through the chang­ing rela­tion­ship between Britons and their land­scape, can’t help but engen­der a mix of emo­tions in the native breast.

Britain is cer­tain­ly enjoy­ing a sort of spe­cial and unwel­come fame at the moment, but how did it come to this? What part – if any – has the land played in turn­ing this bull­dog breed against itself ? How did this cra­dle of civil­i­ty, this bas­tion of eccen­tric­i­ty, become just anoth­er coun­try? What hard­ened the wood­en walls of Eng­land so? And why did Duncan’s hors­es turn and eat themselves?

Arca­dia jour­neys from a sleepy post-War Hob­biton of bar­ley wine and hedgerows, through the beads, beards and bush­es of ​’60s psy­che­del­ic folk revival and on to the glue-sniff­ing Mor­dor of Punk Bri­tan­nia in search of clues. It dis­cov­ers a dis­tant land of kan­ga­roo box­ing, water divin­ers, Mighty Boosh-style this­tle masks and a pro­fu­sion of lla­mas, cheese rolling loonies, pen­ta­grams and enor­mous chalk penis­es. A land where griev­ances are sort­ed out the old-fash­ioned way – with a free-for-all game of out­law street rug­by that descends into some­thing approach­ing a riot. A land where charm, indi­vid­u­al­i­ty and com­mu­ni­ty shine through. Would that it were so…

Helped immea­sur­ably by a lyser­gic sound­track from Adri­an Utley (Por­tishead) and Will Gre­go­ry (Gold­frapp), Arca­dia lay­ers its tum­bling images to form a por­trait of an idio­syn­crat­ic nation that hasn’t so much lost its way, but rather fall­en out of love with itself. The Sex Pis­tols told us that there was no future in England’s dream­ing, but look­ing back from where we stand now it doesn’t look so bad. At least we were all in the same strange dream.