Ray & Liz | Richard Billingham | NYFF 2018
So much of Ray & Liz, the feature-film directorial debut from photographer Richard Billingham is as bleak and depressing of a watch as you’ll see all year or any for that matter.
The film shows the tough living conditions in a squalid council flat just outside of Birmingham. This is personal for Billingham, who digs into his own past and brings himself to re-create the messy and distressing living conditions that he and his brother were brought up in the very same flats as depicted here in a film that both confronts and tries to come to peace with their parents, the titular Ray & Liz.
His dad Ray (Justin Salinger) drank too much, his mom Liz (Ella Smith), smoked too much. They were barely above the poverty line, barely squeaking by each day. Billingham breaks up the film into different segments, each as morbid and hard to watch at the next, but showing different aspects of this distressing family situation.
It’s not an easy picture to sit through, not just in terms of subject matter but also in the narrative way that Billingham projects it. It is his own life after all, so it feels wrong to critique the format, but the way the film is split up into different personal vignettes creates a fractured viewing experience, one that never quite merged into a more solid and concrete whole for me.
But there are some powerful and harrowing shots, mainly of Ray and Liz’s young son Jason (Callum Slater), decided to sleep outside in the shed attached to the house of one of his friends’ whose mom finds him half-frozen to death. It’s something like this that had to be done in order for the young kids to get the attention that they deserved after being neglected by their parents. Or their Uncle Lol (Tony Way) being bullied into abusing alcohol when he’s supposed to be tending to the kids.
There are some powerful moments that definitely stick with you, some provocative performances from Justin Salinger and Ella Smith as the titular pairing, and stunning cinematography from Daniel Landin who brings all of this to life in a way that feels like a polaroid come to life.
As much as this film haunts and sickens, it is a bit too cold to the touch and keeps the viewer at a formidable arm’s length distance away as a result.
Join the conversation