The Future Tense review – invig­o­rat­ing, droll essay film

There’s a lit­tle aside at about the mid­point of Joe Lawlor and Chris­tine Molloy’s essay/​diary/​dream film, The Future Tense, where we see some com­i­cal­ly strobed footage of the late thesp Paul Scofield hav­ing his head lopped off while play­ing Sir Thomas More in Fred Zinnemann’s 1966 his­tor­i­cal epic, A Man For All Sea­sons. The rea­son we see this is because we’ve just paid a vis­it to the Catholic church that Joe’s par­ents got mar­ried in, and there, on a lit­tle plinth, is the same Thomas More stat­ue that can be seen in a pho­to tak­en on the big day.

It feels apt that Schofield makes a cameo appear­ance, because – to go off on my own digres­sion for a moment – he went on from the plush Old Hol­ly­wood fin­ery of the Zin­ne­mann pic­ture to pro­vide the nar­ra­tion for two great films by cine-psy­cho­geo­g­ra­ph­er extra­or­di­naire, Patrick Keiller. These were 1994’s Lon­don, and 1997’s Robin­son In Space. As with The Future Tense, these were works dri­ven by their maker’s fas­ci­na­tion with land­scape, local­i­ty and lit­er­ary allu­sion, a desire to mine enter­tain­ment from plung­ing down the rab­bit hole of research and cre­ativ­i­ty and, in most cas­es, drag­ging a rip­ping yarn back to the surface.

The film sees Lawlor and Mol­loy deliv­er­ing a tag-team to-cam­era mono­logue (they had actors wait­ing in the wings, but Covid scup­pered their plans, they claim) which, ini­tial­ly, details a flight they took from Lon­don to Dublin for a loca­tion rec­ce. As the drowsy bore­dom that comes from peer­ing out a plane win­dow and into the clouds takes hold, the pair begin to reel off freeform thoughts and ideas, main­ly to do with the added sym­bol­ism this trip has accrued since the geopo­lit­i­cal own-goal of Brexit.

Lawlor and Mol­loy tell us that they once made a deci­sion to get the Hell out of Ire­land in the 1980s because, at that point, the neg­a­tives far out-weighed the pos­i­tives. But now, with the UK cur­rent­ly doing its lev­el best to win the Shit­hole of the Year award, maybe it’s time to con­sid­er recon­nect­ing with roots and work­ing out if the rea­sons they left in the first place still hold water.

Yet this ini­tial flur­ry of iden­ti­ty-dri­ven anx­i­ety clev­er­ly segues into a two-pronged explo­ration of the mak­ing of a new fea­ture (about the Axmin­ster-born soci­ety dar­ling turned IRA ban­dit, Rose Dug­dale), and the heart­break­ing dra­ma of tumul­tuous fam­i­ly his­to­ries, focus­ing on the men­tal health prob­lems of Joe’s late moth­er, Helen. Now, were I to detail all the dis­cur­sive foot­notes in this film, we’d be here all night, but with these two expert­ly inter­wo­ven tales we cov­er scads of Irish cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal his­to­ry, as well as search­ing, often wry­ly com­ic pro­nounce­ments on the psy­cho­log­i­cal impact of emi­gra­tion and immigration.

While we daisy-chain across sub­jects, con­ti­nents and time­frames, there are also var­i­ous expert inter­views pep­per into the mix, which offer fur­ther poet­ic insight into the prob­lems that Lawlor and Mol­loy can’t quite put their fin­ger on. It’s a search­ing film that is one minute endear­ing­ly daft, and the next brac­ing­ly sin­cere. Yet, like its mak­ers (you hope!), it’s a film you come away from with a revi­talised sense of the world and the ques­tions cur­rent­ly being asked by thou­sands if not mil­lions of peo­ple across the globe.