December 2009

Radio On (Director: Christopher Petit): A few years ago, I picked up this DVD, likely for the same reason as Plexifilm decided to put it out: an amazing soundtrack fea­turing songs by Bowie, Kraftwerk, Lene Lovich, Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury and more. The reason it’s taken me so many years to actu­ally watch it is that I mis­takenly read some of the film’s reviews. Critically panned at the time, Radio On has become a bit of a cult favourite among a cer­tain type of music-savvy cinephile. But after watching it, I find myself among those who find it a pre­ten­tious exer­cise in style over substance.

Director Chris Petit had been a film critic for Time Out and a big fan of the road movies of German dir­ector Wim Wenders. Remarkably he was able to interest Wenders in signing on as exec­utive pro­ducer for his first film. Wenders recruited his reg­ular cine­ma­to­grapher, Martin Schafer, to shoot it, and so the res­ulting film is a very odd German-English hybrid. Petit’s use of music is per­haps the best thing in the film, pred­ating music videos by years, and his innov­ative intro­duc­tion of the film’s songs in the opening (rather than closing) credits indic­ated the import­ance of music to set­ting the film’s mood. The music of Bowie’s Berlin period and of German elec­tronic pion­eers Kraftwerk is per­fectly matched to the film’s per­vading tex­ture of exist­en­tial angst. The film has been called an example of the post­punk aes­thetic, and it does cap­ture postpunk’s feeling of resig­na­tion, of punk’s anger now spent and des­pair creeping in. England’s late 70s indus­trial decay is pho­to­graphed in grainy black and white, and as a visual and sonic doc­u­ment of time and place, Radio On is beau­tiful and bor­dering on essen­tial. As a nar­rative film, it’s quite another matter.

The plot con­cerns a London DJ who drives to Bristol to invest­igate his brother’s death, an apparent sui­cide. But between the flat acting of David Beames and the script’s stub­born refusal to divulge inform­a­tion to the viewer in a straight­for­ward way, the plot ends up making little sense. And our protagonist’s inter­ac­tions with char­ac­ters along the way are fleeting and devoid of much human warmth. The closest he comes to a human con­nec­tion is with a German woman (there’s the German con­nec­tion again) who is in England looking for her young daughter who has been living with her father. But even that rela­tion­ship ends abruptly, with no explan­a­tion. In the same way, many of the songs on the soundtrack cut off abruptly when our man gets out of his car, or leaves the pub. Essentially, in a pre-Walkman/iPod age, whenever he’s out of earshot of a radio or jukebox, there is no music. It’s a jar­ring effect.

Petit’s attempt to blend Germanic cool with English grime is effective on a sur­face level, but his auteurist flour­ishes grate when it comes to telling a story or depicting a char­acter. The cameo by Sting (in his first film role) back­fires because in his scenes, he’s more inter­esting than the main char­acter. Even the film­makers acknow­ledge this; the film stays with him even as our prot­ag­onist drives away. The gla­cial pace and flat­ness of almost all the other char­ac­ters make us want to stay with him even longer. Strangely, Petit admitted the casting of the Police frontman was a feeble attempt to put bums in seats. Like the split German/English per­son­ality of the film, it also doesn’t seem to know if it wants to be a work of art or of mass appeal.

When the music is playing, the film sings, but when the radio is off, things are much grimmer. Maybe that’s the point, in the end.

(6/10)

Tagged as: germany, postpunk, uk

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