Robert Rylands' Last Journey is lovingly crafted with a complex narrative. By Jonathan Holland
As a Spanish movie shot entirely abroad, Gracia Querejeta's Robert Rylands' Last Journey follows in the footsteps of Gonzalo Suarez's 1988 Remando al viento. Sixty-nine-year-old archaeologist Robert Rylands (an irascible William Franklyn) arrives at a police station in Oxford. We cut to a lush baroque score as a train hurtles through the countryside, containing bemused visiting Spanish lecturer Juan Noguera (Gary Piquer). He is going to stay with his friend, terminally ill Alfred Cromer Blake (Ben Cross, who has traded in his Olympic medal for a black gown).
The first few minutes of this unfashionably glitz-free and lovingly-crafted film open a complex narrative, with references to Juan's brother and the discovery of a mysterious button by Sue (Perdita Weeks), the daughter of Jill, Alfred's sister. The button belongs to Rylands, and typically of this carefully-tailored piece, it will appear in the final scenes.
Propelled by the twin narratives of Rylands' return and Cromer Blake's terminal illness, the plot unravels as Rylands unearths a few facts about his own past in the presence of world-weary cop Archdale (Kenneth Colley).
The experience 'scary' Querejeta calls it of shooting a film abroad (and to a tight nine-week schedule) is not to be sniffed at. This is the 34-year-old's second feature. The first was 1993's Un estación de paso, after an apprenticeship which took in TV and documentary work. 'European co-productions are a good way of fighting the flood of American movies,' she says.
Cynics will be quick to pick up the fact that the dialogue in Robert Rylands occasionally sounds as though it was written in Spanish and then translated, which it was. Others will reply that Oxford academics speak outlandish English anyway, which they do. Querejeta (whose English is good) worked with translators on set. 'I wouldn't be prepared to shoot in a language which isn't my own again,' she says.
At times, her film feels a little like the 'four seasons in one day': British weather always threatening to interrupt shooting; a little overwrought, trying to pack too many deep emotions into an hour and a half. The script (by the Querejeta father/ daughter tandem) took three years to complete, and Gracia admits that at one point they nearly gave up. It still bears some of the scars. There are occasional signs of a struggle towards coherence, as though the form was more important than the substance.
The set pieces particularly a high table scene featuring British character actor Maurice Denham spluttering brilliantly away point up well the absurdity of Oxford life through a stranger's eyes, though Querejeta is quick to point out that this is not an 'Oxford' movie. 'It's about the rivers and channels behind the university buildings,' she says, and dramatic, inventive camerawork (by Antonio Pueche) bears her out.
Another challenge for Querejeta was having to use actors she had never seen. They were chosen from videos sent from London ('I'd never have thought of using Ben Cross,' Querejeta said. 'He almost disappeared after Chariots of Fire.') Once she'd met the leathery faced, implacable Franklyn, he seemed like the ideal choice. 'He didn't mind screen-testing,' Querejeta reveals with youthful modesty. Young policeman Smith is played by Stuart McCallum Wilson, who also mixed the sound, and who had never acted before.
'I didn't want to make a 'difficult' film,' Querejeta says. But she does confess to wishing to make everything a puzzle. And this is where Robert Rylands really does work in the delicate, crafty way it turns repressed British emotions into a cause for suspense.
It is in the film's last third that things start to come together and we realise that we are watching something actually rather moving. This is a careful study of different kinds of human relationship which manages to feel like real life, and which has all the absurd contingencies of the billiards which Juan teaches Sue to play. Along the way, as Rylands comes to learn the meaning of compassion, it manages to raise some pretty awkward moral questions.
'We knew where we wanted to arrive with the script,' Querejeta says. 'The problem was how to get there.' The low-key final scenes, in which all the questions are settled, carry with them an emotional force which is all too rare in Spanish cinema, and they completely undermine Querejeta's wish 'not to make a weepy'. It comes as a surprise to hear that her next project is to be a football documentary. Gareth Southgate's Last Penalty?
Robert Rylands' Last Journey shows on 25 September and is the last Spanish film to be shown in international competition this festival.
Prod co: Alta Films/Elias Querejeta
PC Co-prod: Buxton Films/TVE/ Canal +/ESICMA
Prod: Elias Querejeta
Exec prod: Rosa Romero
Dir: Gracia Querejeta
Guión (Scr): Gracia Querejeta/ Elias Querejeta
Foto (Ph): Antonio Pueche Art dir: Richard Field
Mont (Ed): Nacho Ruiz Capillas
Ints (Cast): William Franklyn, Ben Cross, Cathy Underwood, Gary Piquer
Ventas (Int sales): ESICMA
Duración (Running time): 102 mins
Screening: 9.00, 25 Sept, Victoria Eugenia; 22.00, 25 Sept, Victoria Eugenia; 16.00, 26 Sept, Astoria 3; 20.30, 26 Sept, Astoria 3
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