On the Entitled Pleasures of Misbehaviour: Danny Boyle Digs Deep in Shallow Grave

Cinematekene er et samarbeid om felles digitale visninger på cinematekene i Bergen, Kristiansand, Lillehammer, Oslo, Stavanger, Tromsø og Trondheim. Montages setter fokus på filmene i utvalget gjennom ukentlige artikler. Danny Boyles debutfilm Shallow Grave (1994) vises fra og med torsdag 5. september – sjekk tidspunkter i oversikten hos ditt cinematek.

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is pretty damn difficult to pinpoint the exact role British cinema plays in world film culture. Although it is especially lauded for social realist dramas – in the last three decades offering the incredible richness of critical voices like Andrea Arnold, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh – it’s not what’s most imprinted on popular culture’s memory. The less serious and very sleek, indeed, neo-noirs of the nineties have always tickled my tastebuds, with Guy Ritchie’s films feeling oh-so-cool in my adolescent cinephilia. His career, however, is not where all that coolness started.

While Danny Boyle is most appreciated by critics for Trainspotting (1996), it is his feature debut Shallow Grave (1994) that set up this pop renaissance of the British neo-noir. Re-released for its 30th anniversary earlier this year, it has been lauded as the film that alerted the film industry to the talents of Scottish cinema. Shallow Grave is a lot more than just a Trainspotting precursor, however, even if it assembled much of the same team that would make that cult classic happen.

At 38 years old, Boyle took quite a while to arrive at the release of his first feature film. Coming from a theatre background, having worked as an artistic director for the Royal Court Theatre, he honed down his directorial and producing skills working for the BBC in Northern Ireland. He’s said in an interview that nobody wanted to work there in the late ‘80s, so he got the producer’s job despite lacking industry experience, and even managed to make a deal with the BBC that he would direct TV shows for them for free, so that he could get the skills he was after.

When he read the script for Shallow Grave, by newcomer John Hodge – who was at the time still a practising doctor – Boyle immediately knew he wanted the project. Andrew Macdonald, the producer, was just as fresh, with the cast being only a little less so. It’s thrilling to think that something so stylish could come out of a team of newbies with a tiny budget. That’s why I love feature debuts – often the energy of invention and the arrogant love of the medium is what keeps them afloat, not the polished craft of steady storytelling. The stakes are higher, and so is the pleasure and glee bestowed upon the viewer.

Shallow Grave starts off as a straightforward caper. Three flatmates Juliet (Kerry Fox), David (Christopher Eccleston) and Alex (Ewan McGregor) need to find a fourth one to split the bills of the spacious apartment they inhabit in the very posh neoclassical New Town district of Edinburgh. These young, smug professionals breeze through the interview process with gusto as they bully everyone they deem worthy a scoff—until Hugo (Keith Allen) comes along, promising the literati riches of social capital that comes with living with an enticingly enigmatic writer.

Only that’s not the capital he endows them with as he almost immediately dies – probably from a drug overdose – after moving in. The suitcase full of cash near his sprawled body titillates Juliet and Alex to no end, while David – less of a badboy and more of an accountant – refuses to participate in the very simple plan of let’s-dismember-and-hide-his-body-to-keep-the-money the other two propose. Lame.

Of course, they don’t stop for a moment to think that the suitcase came from somewhere, and whoever it belonged to… well, to get it back, they won’t ask nicely. And so the tensions rise, as does the sex appeal of having done something very, very naughty. That is, unless you’re the one left to dismember poor Hugo.

Shot frugally in thirty days – to the extent that the project ran out of the little money that it had during production, and the filmmakers had to auction “off bits of the set and bits of the furniture because it was pretty cool furniture” to buy more film stock – Shallow Grave already has the playful cinematic self-assurance that would truly explode with Trainspotting. It’s real eye-candy, even as it mostly takes place in the apartment. In this regard, the film follows a juicy British tradition of claustrophobic chamber pieces – I think of my absolute favourite, Joseph Loseys The Servant (1963). The apartment and, uhm, re-decorations that take place there not only reflect the increasingly agitated (and horny) state of its inhabitants – they also provide a playground for Boyle and his cinematographer Brian Tufano to mess around in.

The apartment was built in a warehouse in Glasgow, which provided the opportunity to make it larger-than-life. The result is an oddly disquieting feeling – and I’m sure it’s not just because we’re living during a crisis of affordable housing precarity – that, somehow, these frivolous humans have no business occupying this vast space. The harsh echo of the phone bell reminds us how ill-equipped these people are at managing the environment they’re contained by, with the phone incessantly grating on everyone’s nerves (including the viewer’s).

The apartment is like a labyrinth with a pulse of its own – ominous despite the brightly coloured walls and cosy interior design, claustrophobic despite its eerie proportions. Maybe the fact that the flatmates all turn against one another is not because of guilt or jealousy – maybe it’s that the space finally outmans them. They should have just found another flatmate.

It still puzzles me how Boyle and his editor Masahiro Hirakubo built up such an excited cadence within Shallow Grave that they would solidify with Trainspotting. In my head, at least, I associate chamber pieces with suave long takes, the camera lazily drifting through space, spreading dread like fresh hummus. Shallow Grave has those shots, too, but the film’s rhythm is also frenetic: it radiates the thrill of all the possibilities that a suitcase full of dirty money has to offer (if you care for that sort of thing). Achieving that within one space is quite impressive, and it helps to illustrate what behaving so outrageously does to Juliet and Alex.

For them, the respectable middle-class Edinburghians, criminal transgression is clearly stimulating. And I get that. All three flatmates realise that life, actually, has a lot more to offer than the officially endorsed bourgeois life manual they’d been following. What a queer revelation. It’s clearly not about money at all – it’s about the blood rush. The danger. The calculating competition between each other they won’t acknowledge, but that is part of the appeal of the whole thing.

It’s quite poignant that none of these three even need any money. They’ve lived so comfortably they lack any imagination to spend it with any appropriate nouveau riche outrageousness, anyway. Moreover, Juliet has a string of lovers pining after her (hence the constant phone ring) but who simply bore her. That’s it – it’s the boredom. The comfort that makes them so eager to misbehave, but also makes them susceptible to the innocence of entitlement – they really believe they can easily get away with it all.

Boyle first wanted to get away from the clasp of the social realists and claimed there was no class commentary or political subtext of any sort in Shallow Grave, even if the three actors riffed off different shades of Edinburghian arrogance. For me, the fact that they built the set in the city’s antithesis – the very much working-class Glasgow – only adds to the cheekiness. In retrospect, Boyle admitted Shallow Grave is “deeply embedded in post-Thatcherite decay in Britain” and explores germane themes of “greed, aggrandisement, pleasure, selfishness, individualism”.

Nonetheless, the film is far from a (social) realistic analysis of why a plan this half-assed and cruel would ever occur to anyone. The viewing pleasure of Shallow Grave lies not in finding plot holes. It’s the theatricality of the setting and the dynamics between characters, teased out beautifully by each performer; especially Ewan McGregor who, in his own words, plays a very special type of wanker so seductively it kicked off his film career proper.

Maybe it’s due to Boyle’s background, but watching Shallow Grave, I had a strong feeling of observing a stage play. It also strongly reminded me of the universe of Peter Greenaway’s films – the characters behave with a similar theatrical frigidity, even as their behaviour becomes increasingly erratic. Just like with Greenaway, this impenetrable coolness of the characters’ innards makes it a fascinating, surreal watch. Only Shallow Grave is more accessible, perhaps, low-key and urban. The ambition minus the grandiosity.

It paid off to be ambitious: Shallow Grave has a surprising amount of plates spinning despite being a debut, or a mere crime thriller. It’s a pretty good lesson in what one can achieve with little money but a lot of will to punch above one’s weight. In the end, it’s that energy of Shallow Grave that still captures the viewer, and reminds me how fresh filmmaking can get, even in low budget genre flicks. The thrill of creativity that Boyle and his team poured into this feature is contagious.

I love kitchen sink dramas as much as the next bloke, but what a joy it is that Boyle rebelled against them all.

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Gabrielė Liepa (b. 1993) is a film & literature graduate from Amsterdam University College. Their interest focuses on arthouse, queer and/or Eastern European films. They are currently studying creative film production in Berlin.