Dad

“That could bring a tear to a glass eye!”

Michelle Bailey’s father gives his seal of approval to her new short film, ‘Dad’. A proud moment for father and daughter alike? Surely?

The 11-minute film follows a man stumbling his way from church, through the defaced, grey suburbs of Coventry, via an off-license with state-of-the-art CCTV, to his putrid bedsit, where he is concerned only with finding something else to drink. The ‘down-and-out’. The man who’s forsaken all he had for an addiction. That’s a familiar subject, perhaps, but it’s Bailey’s handling of it that’s remarkable here. To start, the portrayal of this figure is well-executed. George McCluskey gives an engaging performance in the role, whilst the cinematography is impressive, and the soundtrack eerily nonchalant.

This man’s story is laced with clues of some past relationship to a child – the doll left under the church pew, the deserted swings in the park, the box of memories through which he coldly riffles to find his “secret” bottle of vodka. His reactions are minimal and he appears barely affected, hardly a man who is plagued by regret. The fleeting presence of youth is brought to a greater level of immediacy with brief flashes of genuine camcorder footage and real-life voice-recordings of an excitable child, elusively woven into these scenes of raw misery. These touches make a ghostly suggestion that the consequences of his affliction extend beyond just himself, beyond fiction, even, and into reality.

But from nowhere comes the epilogue, like a piece of flying crockery hitting the dining room wall. Bailey concludes the film with a fly-on-the-the-wall-documentary scene in which she shows her own semi-coherent father this piece of ‘fiction’ (shot previous to the occasion, obviously). Once it has finished he announces his “tear to a glass eye” theory, pitifully unaware of the film’s relevance or purpose. Out of shot, but clearly trying to remain stoical and professional in the face of an obscenely personal situation, she explains that she has made it as a coping mechanism for his deterioration into alcoholism and absence from her life. He is genuinely surprised by this, and the exchange that follows is a minute’s-worth of dense emotional discomfort, for both director and viewer.

The shifting narrative and moments of self-reference in this film are far from being clever for clever’s sake. It hasn’t set out to be a head-bender, one of those films in which the narrative is the film, normally due to a lack of any real content. Here, one might say the reaction to the film is the film; that the process of making it was just a part of a wider, more personal goal. Bailey tells the real story of her father, not by imagining and reconstructing a day in his life but by showing him that she has done just that, and capturing his reaction. This makes a far more honest and potent portrait than any straight-forward dramatisation could. She has neatly tied together these different formats, surfing the boundaries of genre, to the greatest emotive effect.

‘Dad’ is as much a display of courage as it is talent, from a skilled first-time director. As an expression of personal trauma, it’s audacious, poignant and endearing. As a piece of cinema, it’s straight-up entertaining.

‘Dad’ will be appearing at SoCal Independent film festival, California, where it will be part of their on-line screening room  between September 23^rd – October 7^th 2012. You can view and vote for the film, wherever you are, at Flipside

For more on the director and her mission to re-ignite the West Midlands’ film-making reputation head to Baileyface Productions