Saturday, May 14, 2011

Shadow lines

BBC2 conspiracy thriller is a long way from Marion & Geoff. But, says Blick, both are about 'obsession becoming heroism'

The Shadow Line is, in every way, a noir thriller. With one foot in the world of the police, who are investigating the death of drug lord Harvey Wratten, and another in the bowels of the criminal world that Wratten inhabited, Hugo Blick's conspiracy drama is layered like a mille-feuille dessert. Unlike anything that's been on British TV for some time, The Shadow Line is very cinematic; there are moments, like when Jonah Gabriel (Chiwetel Ejiofor) finds an allen key leading to the discovery of a briefcase full of crisp fifties, where you feel like you're lost in one of the meta-layers of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Just when you think things are getting a bit clearer, something like that happens and the menace that's left in the rest of the frame engulfs you. It's big, frightening and, for some, perhaps fills a Forbrydelsen-shaped hole. Only, unlike The Killing, there are lots of spies, frightening grandpas and a much, much higher body count.

The Shadow Line is miles away from everything Blick (Operation Good Guys, Marion & Geoff, Sensitive Skin, The Last Word Monologues) has done before. Particularly from Marion & Geoff, the show he's most renowned for. Co-written with Rob Brydon, that darkly funny comic drama was about one man in a small space into which the big, bad world came crashing in, formed of monologues by Brydon as Keith Barret, a cab driver desperate to stay optimistic after his wife Marion left him for a man called Geoff. "If you think about my previous work," says Blick, "it is more monologue-y. I often thought of Marion & Geoff as a solo piece being played on a piano where, if you get a note wrong, you can fluff it all."

When Blick talks, all you can see is the teeth. He is basically Jack Nicholson (fittingly he played the young Joker in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman film); the corners of his mouth curl so far and wide up into his cheeks, you lose all sense of your surroundings. If Marion & Geoff was a solo piece, what would the much-loved Sensitive Skin ? an understated, poignant sitcom with Joanna Lumley trying to navigate her way through rickety married life ? be? "A Schubert quartet," he says.

Before writing The Shadow Line, Blick wondered "what it would be like if I wrote a symphony?" Luckily, he says "the BBC were enthused about the idea I had for this project. So I then spent four months sat in a room thinking about it." He laughs, manically, which he does a lot. His writing may have a dark heart, but Blick is infectiously buoyant. And, despite talking about his work in terms of quartets and symphonies, he doesn't seem at all pretentious, only eccentric. Very eccentric.

'I bought a white board and created a double helix of the entire conspiracy, working backwards with the murder at the bottom'

How on earth do you go about beginning to write a plot with so many intertwining roots, especially if intimate, introspective comedy is the genre that's defined you? "The thing is," says Blick, "I was an accident of comedy." How so? "Well I didn't expect to be in that ? department. I thought all along that I was writing drama with funny lines. Drama, to me, is something that tells the truth. Comedy tells the truth as well, but can feel too heightened to be realistic. My interest is in finding the dramatic truth of something." It doesn't really get more dramatic than The Shadow Line. "No," he says, laughing again, "It really doesn't. I bought a white board, three feet by four, and created a double helix of the entire conspiracy, working backwards with the murder at the bottom." However, although the plot of The Shadow Line is dense, it's never without complete focus. It has a strong, clearly authored heartbeat. You only get lost if you blink ? something Blick says he didn't do once when making the drama. "It was a strong-blooded thing to do," he says, "but I wanted to reject the common thriller notion of saying, 'OK, let's jeopardise the thing closest to the hero and he'll be saved in the nick of time.' I was interested in the idea of testing the hero against the gods and the idea that, ultimately, you can't win." What a desperate thought. "Yes, exactly. But the key is, in the process of trying to win, and fight these bigger forces, you may make yourself matter. There is something that happens later on that will wake you up in your sleep, because you'll have thought about it in the last week."

'Chiwetel's character is obsessed with being morally sound. But in order to do that he has to place himself, and his loved ones, in jeopardy. And is that really heroic?'

Visually, The Shadow Line's cinematography references the glassy, moody look of the post-Nixon, pre-Reagan 70s American thriller, particularly Gordon Willis's work on The Godfather. Blick is keen to point out, though, that they weren't "enslaved" to it. He also says painting played a big part in how he visualised the series. "I imagined Edward Hopper painting a crime scene," he says, animatedly. "Or a Turner, but with a big drop of blood. But if we're talking about film references, the daddy of them all for me is The Spy Who Came In From The Cold." Martin Ritt's 1965 film was an adaptation of John le Carr�'s gloomy cold war thriller novel, and you can see the imprint the film has had. The Shadow Line, like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, is tightly wound ? in both dialogue and the writing of the characters - to devastating effect. And there is a running theme of obsession, something Blick has a particular interest in: "I'm interested in people in extremis, and normally the expression of that is obsession, which comes in various guises." Does he think there are parallels, then, to be drawn through all the characters he creates? That they isolate themselves through their obsessions? "Yes. If there is one thing that I constantly revisit, it's isolation. And how obsession becomes about heroism, and how questionable that heroism can be. For example, Chiwetel's character is obsessed with being morally sound; perhaps he wasn't in the past, and he wants to reconcile. But in order to do that he has to place himself, and his loved ones, in jeopardy. And is that really heroic? Oh! [gasps] I find it bloody fascinating."

Crime, and the nature of criminals, gives Blick a platform to become forensic ? in every sense ? in his exploration of how people function. And when he talks about "real" criminals ? "not the celeb ones that Guy Ritchie picks out of biographies" ? the ones who function utterly silently, his voice drops about three octaves, giving away what is clearly a personal obsession. "I'm interested in how these inexorable killers collide with the real world; how they disguise themselves. Here, they're vampires ? dressed in grandad's clothes, asking to use your lavatory ? but the minute you let them in, you're dead. It's fabulous!"

Although The Shadow Line is a fully fledged drama, there is a mordant wit to it that stops it being too heavy-footed. It's hard to put your finger on, as there are obviously no one-liners or crafty gags, but Blick says the "meter of wit" is there because, when you think about it, "the worst that can happen is that you'll end up dying. And how bad is that?" He roars with laughter: "If you employ that notion, even the most deadly characters have a grim humour."


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/may/14/hugo-blick-shadow-line

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