Cherry Tree Lane
Not so Funny Games
A middle-aged, middle class couple (Tom
Butcher and Rachael Blake) frostily eat dinner, sniping at each other over
whether or not they should have the telly on (he wants to watch the news, she
doesn’t), their unspoken hostility the result of her previous infidelity with a
work colleague. So far, so Mike Leigh.
The doorbell rings. A gang of hoodies push their way into the house, tie them
up and spend the next hour brutalising them while waiting for the couple’s
teenage son (a schoolmate who has earned their wrath) to return home. And.
That’s. It. No, really. That’s the entire film!
A middle class Little Englander vision of Broken Britain, Cherry
Tree Lane is a home invasion thriller that owes more
than a little to Austrian chuckle-meister
Michael Haneke’s loathsome Funny Games.
But where Funny Games was a hectoring
harangue directed at the audience which ruthlessly
dissected Hollywood genre conventions and the
audiences scopophiliac expectation, Cherry
Tree Lane is content to play on its audience’s tabloid-inspired anxiety of the underclass. Williams’ hoodies aren’t the polite, coldly intelligent, young sociopaths of
Haneke’s film, they’re one-dimensional, inarticulate teenage thugs who treat an evening of rape
and murder as a bit of an inconvenience that interferes with their telly viewing, one of them even calling his
mum to ask her to tape a programme he’s missing. And I’m not even going to open
the obvious racial can of worms that is the ethnic background of Cherry Tree
Lane’s assailants as opposed to the clean-cut
Aryans of Funny Games. Oops, silly me, I’ve gone
and done it, worms all over the floor.
Unfolding in real-time, watching Cherry Tree Lane
is far more tortuous for the audience than it is for its protagonists. Williams
seems unsure what to do with his characters once he’s set up his situation, so
we get the hoodies bickering, eating biscuits,
smoking a spliff, critiquing the family’s DVD
collection and occasionally indulging in a bit of random brutality until the leader gets a bit rape-happy
and drags the wife from the room to engage in a spot of off-screen sexual
assault. And there lies Cherry Tree Lane’s major problem. The good stuff all happens off-screen.
Shorn of Haneke’s dour moral arguments and
rhetoric, Cherry Tree Lane is just a genre
movie without teeth and what’s the point of that? It doesn’t have the slick
excitement of David Fincher’s Panic Room,
the creeping horror and menace of Ils (Them),
the intelligence and gender politics of Straw Dogs, the sleazy exploitation thrills and dodgy morality of The House on
the Edge of the Park or the gore and sheer
Gallic insanity of Inside. Haneke was right;
as an audience we expect certain guilty pleasures from this kind of movie. We want sex, we want violence, we want to
be scared. But contrary to what Haneke thinks, we’re
not wrong to want these things. That’s why we’re watching in the first place. We don’t want hoodies discussing the merits of different types of
biscuits. Not unless they’re, say, cutting an unborn foetus from a victim at
the same time (The Lost). We want them to scare
us. We want our brutalised underdogs to fight back. We want the wet-blanket
hubby to grow some balls and take someone out with
a bear trap the way Dustin Hoffman does in Straw Dogs. And we don’t want these things happening off-screen either. I’m no fan
of torture-porn but I’m not watching a film like Cherry Tree Lane for the wit and sparkling dialogue. I want a little gratification.
The most disappointing thing about Cherry
Tree Lane however is that it’s looking increasingly
likely that writer/director Paul Andrew Williams isn’t going to make another
film as good as his 2006 debut movie London to Brighton, which was as refreshing and unpredictable as Cherry Tree Lane is bland and boring. Even his second film, the misfiring, blackly
comic, horror flick The Cottage had its moments.
Admittedly they were when some inbred took a hatchet to Jennifer Ellison and
Gollum but give Williams his due, he was giving his audience what it wanted.
Namely, for some inbred to take a hatchet to Jennifer Ellison and Gollum.
Lacking the enthralling power of London to
Brighton or the guilty, gross-out laughs of The
Cottage, the most subversive thing about Cherry
Tree Lane is its title; Cherry Tree Lane was, of
course, where the family lived in Mary Poppins,
a much better, more intelligent film than Cherry Tree Lane. Seriously. Watch Mary Poppins;
it’s a better way to spend your time.
David
Watson
Director
Paul Andrew Williams
Cast
Sonny Muslim, Kieran Dooner, Rachael Blake,
Jenny Jacques, Jumayn Hunter, Tom Butcher, Tom Kane, Corinne Douglas, Ashley
Chin
Country
UK
Screenplay
Paul Andrew Williams
Running time
78min
Year
2010
Certificate
18
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