London Road is a middle class residential street in Ipswich, a quiet city near London. After a football stadium was built, prostitutes began to come to London Road to work in the adjacent streets and alleys, changing the character of the neighborhood. Then in 2006, from late October and into December, five women were found murdered in the area. Police identified the victims as local prostitutes, and quickly arrested a suspect who was tried, found guilty of all the murders, and sentenced to life in prison in 2008. Those are the facts.
London Road, the musical film, also takes place on London Road during this time, but is not really about any of that. We don’t see the killings, the victims, the police investigation, the perpetrator, or the trial. What we do see are the residents of London Road: We see how they reacted to these events, how they coped, and how they worked to bring joy back into their community. We also hear from some of the surviving prostitutes. And, sometimes for very comic relief, we see the people of the media attempting to report what goes on.
This movie is billed as a musical (and follows a successful stage musical run in London), though I can't help thinking of it as an opera. Notably, aside from what must have been drawn directly from transcripts of news reports, the libretto consists entirely of words, phrases and sentences taken verbatim and distilled from three years of interviews with the people, both residents and sex workers, of London Road. Their plain and very real speech has been scored precisely to preserve each speaker’s pitch, tone and rhythm, and then transformed through a sometimes percussive and repetitive, sometimes lyrical or contrapuntal musical treatment into recitatives, duets, and full ensemble pieces set in the homes and public places of London Road, a street in Ipswich.
During the time of the murders, Julie introduces one of the first songs as she sidles down the sidewalk next to the hulking sports stadium: “Everyone is very, very nervous...um… and very unsure of everything… basically.” Then her refrain is repeated by other characters, each in their own way, and finally expressed as a full choral piece by many Christmas shoppers, who come together to share the sentiment in a public square under the shadow of a grotesquely large Santa statue, which broadcasts quietly in the background, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” Movies just don’t get any better than this!
Through this scene wander two wide eyed teenage girls, caught between horror and giggling (“It’s like, it could be anyone in here….I’m just gonna, like, cry, Ha! Ha!”), as they attempt to process the inconceivable--the realization that comes to many women eventually that any man “could be him… Is it him? Is it him?” They trip--transfixed, inspecting the face of each man they pass-- through a bus ride, coffee shop, and a store populated with male mannequins, as their refrain is repeated throughout the community in an eerie chorus of Christmas shoppers of all ages. “Is it him?”
The men of the community, for their part, are faced, perhaps for the first time in their lives, with the realization that they might be under suspicion simply for being male. They even begin to view each other warily. One tells a nervous woman, “There’s a psychopath on the loose. Dreadful. Dreadful. It’s as if someone’s chucked acid on you. And you can feel it all over you. It’s… standing here, you can feel it. We’re all guilty. No, no we’re not. Just one person is...but...No, we’re not. The rest of us are sane.” The girls look on doubtfully. and sing, “You automatically think ‘It could be him’… Yeah”
And these are just the first few minutes, the most gothic part of the film. Fortunately the murders stop in December when a suspect is arrested, but he has been living on London Road, and his boarded-up house stands as a macabre reminder to residents of dreadful events as they struggle to come to terms, in their different ways, with the intrusion of such evil into their quiet lives. The film chronicles, with unflagging energy and insight, their experience as they witness the case slowly wending its way through the court, and try to keep their community together as it becomes an object of public fascination.
The prostitutes, or sex workers, are also given their due, if somewhat parenthetically, when several of them poignantly describe how the murders affected them. They are haunted by thoughts of the murdered women, and have made some changes for the better in their lives, but I won’t presume to quote them; It’s better to hear them sing their own stories. In a narrative counterpoint, the residents describe, according to their different natures (some more kindly than others) how they feel about these women.
In the end, as befits any epic of journey or war, order is restored and joy is found again. The people dance. I won’t spoil the ending, but it includes a garden competition no gardener would want to miss.
There is a lot more to praise and comment upon in this film. It’s as stark, yet layered and sometimes colorful, as the variety of urban life it chronicles. Yes, it was a grim time, but the story also offers significant moments of great sweetness and several varieties of humor. As one of the characters says, “All of humanity is right here.”
I saw London Road first in a theater, where it had the impact of an opera simulcast on a large screen. But my second viewing on DVD at home had its points as well: With subtitles on, the poetry of the lyrics really stands out. Finally, during the end credits, portions of the original recorded interviews are played. The voices are eerily true to the music which, by then, will be running through a viewer’s memory, affirming the truth of the story:
“We’re really upset… He was only there for ten weeks Ten weeks! It’s just a chance. The one place in the … in the whole world where he went to live for ten weeks. Could’ve been anywhere. Could’ve been next to you.”
No comments:
Post a Comment