TYPIST ARTIST PIRATE KING
The 42nd Cambridge Film Festival (CFF) got off to cracking start with the wonderfully titled, ‘Typist Artist Pirate King’ (no commas). It was a suitable delirious title for a biopic about a most extraordinary – and yet deeply ordinary – artist. Carol Morley’s homage to Audrey Amiss, a long neglected British artist from Sunderland, is no romantic hagiography. Amiss who died in 2013, the year Morley began working on the film’s script, left behind a vast output of unsold and un-shown work. The early stuff is figurative – brightly coloured seaside scenes; her later work more abstract but always attention given to vibrant colour and searing light. Morley was given access to the hidden collection and was determined to tell Audrey’s story. And she tells it as a journey, both physical and metaphorical. This is a road movie like no other.
Audrey played viscerally and with total conviction by Monica Dolan, is seen in later life. She is haunted by mental instability and by the ghosts of her troubled childhood. She lives a life of chaos surrounded by piles of her work and the wrappers from every oven-ready meal she has consumed. Morley is clearly a huge fan of Audrey’s work – her paintings and lustrous scribblings intersperse with the telling of her journey from madness to a kind of redemptive healing. To tell this complex story about a woman beyond the edge, about the nature of art and artist, about the artist’s hyper-seeing eye, Morley has come up with a most satisfying device.
Audrey is cared for by Sandra, an NHS mental health nurse played with glowing humanity but gentle timidity by Kelly Macdonald. Audrey insists that Sandra takes her in the latter’s tiny electric car from London to Sunderland via the B roads. Thus we embark on what seems to be a classic road movie. And in many way it is as the lovely scenery of England’s north east is given plenty of visual space. But it is the space inside Audrey’s head and the road trip itself that takes centre stage. Audrey and Sandra are an unlikely pair – the volatile and mentally scarred artist and her often exasperated but loyal carer/friend. Morley has come up with a very fresh take on Audrey’s childhood flashbacks en route. The artist suffers from a condition where the people she meets are to her, figures from her past: a yoga teacher her old headmistress for instance. Some of the ‘ghosts’ bring back the most pained memories and Audrey is not beyond lashing out verbally and with the odd punch thrown as well. Throughout the journey, we see Audrey in all her moods but catch a glimpse too of her genius. A genius who described herself on an old passport as, yes you guessed it, ‘Typist Artist Pirate King’.
The film is a most well-rounded essay on the importance of seeing the real person, however eccentric in behaviour, behind the mental illness diagnosis. Later on we meet Audrey’s sister Dorothy (who in real life died as the film was being completed). She is played with beautiful calm and grace by the ever-watchable Gina McKee. Old sibling jealouses and a physical trauma involving a horrible event in the woods, bring the film to a moment of jaw-dropping revelation. Audrey Amiss, the artist, the demon and the angel, and Audrey Amiss the vulnerable human being is never left out of the film’s complex equations.
This is an ambitious British movie, a tribute to Morley’s determination (against the indifference of would-be backers) to get Audrey’s story told. At the Q and A to follow this opening film, an audience member asked ‘Does your journey with Audrey continue?’ Morley replied that now her film is completed, Audrey Amiss is now our business.
