BFI Southbank

Original image © Metro Centric

Being something of an amateur film enthusiast, I find that London is able to provide enough cinematic variation to keep me occupied. There’s the usual range of Odeons and Cineworlds to charge eye-watering prices for tiny screening rooms divided only by net curtains cunningly disguised as walls; there’s the Everyman range that leans towards the plush sofa seats and popcorn bans; just down the road from me is the East Finchley Phoenix that does a nice line in Sunday double-bills and then in central London there’s both the BFI IMAX for when I feel like developing a kink in my neck, and the BFI Southbank for never-ending Kubrick seasons, various black and white nostalgia flicks about the Liverpudlian working class, and occasionally something good like The Terminator or something by Terry Gilliam.

The BFI Southbank is, like every building on London’s Famous South bank, a great big concrete hulk, inhospitable and ugly, yet still a lure for all sorts of trendies who like being seen at London’s Famous South bank. The entire place rubs me up the wrong way, but it’s not the building, it’s the goddamn people.

Recently I visited the BFI to see a triple-bill of the Red Riding trilogy, a heavily-hyped series of made-for-TV film noirs set in Yorkshire during the ’70s and ’80s. Packed with talented northern actors and directed and written by well-respected film makers, the one film I saw was unfortunately tedious, pretentious and generally a big load of old shite. You wouldn’t know it from the audience reaction though, giving the attending cast and crew a standing ovation and creasing up with laughter at every feeble gag. I started wondering if I was watching a different film to the rest of them, but eventually I figured it was just because Paddy Considine was in the audience and they all wanted to be his friend.

My suspicion grew in the toilets after the film, as grown men jostled to stand next to him at the urinal, being prevented from doing so by me, of all people, who had just wanted to take a piss and wasn’t being that tactical. Have you ever tried going to the toilet while tall men around you try to establish who Paddy Considine likes the most based on who has the most booming, blokey, matey voice? Well, it isn’t easy, that’s all I’m going to say.

Try thinking of running water

It continued in the bar – the swarming, that is, not the pissing – as people gathered around the Famous and refused to budge. They didn’t really talk to them or have conversations of their own, they just sort of hung around nearby them, as if they were hoping for something cinematic to rub off on them – perhaps, yes, if they could only be nearby Mike Leigh enough, they too would end up with a BFI retrospective one day, or at the very least a slim, dry academic appraisal of one of their better-received films.

It’s reached the point where even the promise of a Blade Runner day – a Blade Runner day! – isn’t enough to stop me being in two minds about a trip across the river. There are just times of the day, and days of the week, where the BFI may as well be off limits to the likes of me. If there’s a film on during the evening I’m now unlikely to go because the place is teeming with these immaculately-dressed, perfectly-groomed young things with the brains of horses, all looking around to see who’s looking at them.

I struggle to get served at the bar. All I usually want is a coffee; I’m too short, I think. Everyone else there seems to be at least six inches taller than me and more assertive and confident, so I’m out of the bar staff’s eyeline and am routinely gazumped by some cretin in a camel-hair coat asking if they have any light Italian lagers.

If I’m lucky enough to make eye contact with the bar staff it normally lasts for about a second, just enough time for their faces to register surprise that there’s this homunculus peering back at them out of the dark crevice formed by someone else’s highly fashionable armpit, his mouth forming the words “Hi, can I please have a –” before the moment passes and they return their attention to someone with more stylish embroidery. You can see the confusion on their faces as they think “What the hell’s he doing there?” and try to work out if I’m somebody’s conjoined twin or not. The last time I tried being served I was passed over five times before the red mist descended and I gave up to fight my way back out of the crowd, intentionally jostling as many Cabernet Sauvignons as I could.

Mimicry

Within the natural world there is an evolutionary tactic known as Batesian mimicry, a tactic that occurs all over the world in many, many different species. It involves a harmless species evolving to imitate the warning signals of a harmful species, to better avoid common predators. It’s simple yet effective; a snake, for instance, doesn’t need to actually be venomous if it looks like a different variety of snake that is venomous. A butterfly can avoid being eaten in large quantities if it looks enough like that other butterfly – the poisonous one over there – that its natural predators will avoid it. I’d recommend Seven Deadly Colours by Andrew Parker if you want to read up on the subject, and hell, why wouldn’t you? It’s fascinating stuff, particularly when you reach the bit about the mimic octopus.

Anyway, perhaps that’s what I need to consider. After all, most of my grievances above can be seen through the lense of evolutionary biology: pecking orders, plumage and so forth. So why not this as well?

In the absence of added height and fashion, I just need to look more like I belong there. The goatee needs to return, I need some thick, black-rimmed glasses and perhaps I need to make better use of my black polo-neck. Topped with a beret and a well-thumbed screenplay visible under my arm at all times, I wouldn’t – in theory – need to worry about getting served at the bar; I could just enlist some of the plovers I would doubtlessly attract. All it would take would be the promise that yes, I would certainly consider them – or their partner – for a walk-on role in my next feature. No, I didn’t actually have funding for it per se, but Mike Leigh had been showing a lot of interest.

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