REVIEW: London Road (2015, Dir. Rufus Norris)

Your reaction to Rufus Norris' big screen translation of Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork's stage musical, London Road, is likely to rest on a number of variables. It will depend on your appetite for impressionistic, repetitious, sometimes atonal, musical theatre. It will depend on where you stand on the appropriateness of setting a community's reaction to a series of sex worker murders to music. Mostly though, I'd hazard that it will depend on your ability to integrate the competing, often conflicting messaging, something the film itself struggles with at length.

Taking transcripts from interviews held with the typically English inhabitants of a typical English street who are caught in the midst of a horrifically atypical series of murders – though even those could be viewed as typical given the victims of violence were the road’s resident street-side sex workers – London Road steps bravely into upsetting territory with a song in its prosaic heart. It makes for an impressive take on the modern English musical, the musical theatre equivalent of opera’s ‘Peter Grimes’, if you will.

Blythe and Cork utilise the mundane pronouncements to build musical phrases, capturing the um-ah-tripping speech patterns in crisp, often haunting crescendos. Their series of cup-of-tea-swilling neighbours (led by a superb Olivia Coleman) provide tuneful matter of fact commentary during the police investigation. The affair drags on into a lengthy, well-televised court case, their songs tilt towards combatting the nation’s perception of the small community, and the households decide to plan a gardening competition to improve their public image. Cue pretty colours.

As movie musicals go, London Road is extremely effective in its use of the medium’s capacity for flair. It is, of course, used with some sense of irony, with heightened reality playing off the dour setting and dire scenario. A dance scene becomes an expression of community paranoia. A news reporter’s practice runs tumble out with unsettling comedy. In this, Norris captures the overall sentiment but his narrative through-line falls foul of the work’s diffuseness. Generally, it would fall to the screenplay to trace a cohering path but here, the characters are constrained by their transcriptive creation and can do little to guide the film’s trajectory.

While this would not have been so evident on the unifying setting of the theatre stage, Norris struggles find the balance between the cinematic close-up and the need for his audience to navigate the material’s thematic juxtaposition on their own. He never gives the necessary leeway to step back and survey the scene, so the work’s thrust, an uneasy mix of celebratory community beautification and distasteful social exclusion, gets lost in translation. Attempts to underscore the work’s internal contradiction only leave the film feeling flaccidly prescriptive in its celebratory closing scenes.

That is not to say that such navigation could ever be easy. Indeed, Norris expects you to witness his film's confronting defacement of the middle class milieu and sympathise with the characters’ general plight. Not the easiest of tasks. Setting it all to music only adds another barrier. Interestingly, where movie musicals usually enforce a fanciful distance from their goings-on, here the effect is the opposite; with its vernacular musicality, London Road focuses the audience on every syllable that’s sung, especially the uncomfortable ones.

The result is an impressive subversion of the form, guaranteed to have you slumping in the aisles.

★★★★

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