Fur­ther Beyond

Here’s a ques­tion for you: is there such a thing as a British art­house movie? Like, some­thing chal­leng­ing and idio­syn­crat­ic, the type of thing they’d punch out in con­ti­nen­tal Europe as non­cha­lant­ly as they would floss their teeth? Okay, maybe that’s a mite unfair, as we do have direc­tors like Ben Rivers and Joan­na Hogg doing the Lord’s work for us, but it’s easy – too easy – to count the names of the com­mit­ted British art­house auteurs on the fin­gers of a sin­gle hand.

The Lon­don-based Irish film­mak­ing duo, Chris­tine Mol­loy and Joe Lawlor, make films, direct plays, pro­duce instal­la­tions and, were there any jus­tice in the world, some idle dowa­ger will write them a blank cheque to be able to be cre­ative and inde­pen­dent until their dying days. They are cre­ative film­mak­ers, inter­est­ed as much in what shouldn’t as what should appear on the screen.

This bril­liant lat­est fea­ture offers a play­ful decon­struc­tion of con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive film­mak­ing, pick­ing up on bad habits and clichés and punc­tur­ing through the fourth wall to empha­sise the sub­tle con­nec­tions between fact and fic­tion. Fur­ther Beyond is a movie biopic that’s been care­ful­ly pulled inside-out, inter­est­ed in pos­ing ques­tions about the ethics of rep­re­sen­ta­tion and what it means to deliv­er per­son­al his­to­ry as objec­tive fact.

This is (very, very loose­ly) the sto­ry of Ambro­sio O’Higgins, First Mar­quis of Osorno, but instead of an bland trans­po­si­tion of Wiki-facts to the screen, the film offers a dry­ly com­ic com­men­tary of what the mak­ers would show, why, how and where. The God-like voice over is pro­vid­ed by Denise Gough and Alan How­ley, both seen at var­i­ous points record­ing their lines read from pages in a script and engag­ing with the sim­i­lar­ly God-like fig­ures behind the cam­era. These amus­ing moments demys­ti­fy the idea of the nar­ra­tor as all-know­ing sage.

Added to the mix are spec­u­la­tions on land­scape, char­ac­ter and con­text – it’s a film about the life of a per­son, but also on the mine­field of respon­si­bil­i­ties that any sto­ry­teller worth their salt needs to con­sid­er. It’s a charm­ing, sur­pris­ing and whol­ly orig­i­nal movie which polite­ly asks view­ers to be mind­ful of the movies they’re watch­ing and the ​“facts” they’re blind­ly accepting.

Yet it nev­er stoops to a man­ner which comes across as hec­tor­ing or haughty, as the biggest trick Lawlor and Mol­loy are able to pull is mak­ing this film about a film about a film feel both invig­o­rat­ing and strange­ly mov­ing. Ingest­ing this work is an active rather than pas­sive expe­ri­ence, one that puts pres­sure on the imag­i­na­tion and recog­nis­es that the fun of invent­ing sto­ries shouldn’t be left to didac­tic film­mak­ers who might be ful­fill­ing a polit­i­cal motive. It’s proof that ask­ing ques­tions can some­times be far more inter­est­ing and con­clu­sive than mere­ly list­ing a bunch of spec­u­la­tive answers.