On a Clear Day

Produced by Sarah Curtis and Dorothy Berwin

Cast: Peter Mullan, Brenda Blethyn, Billy Boyd, Jamie Sives, Sean McGinley, Ron Cook, Jodhi May, Benedict Wong.

A surprising and heartening film about resilience and recovery from tragedy and grief, On a Clear Day is set in present day Glasgow where 55 year-old Frank (Peter Mullan) has just been made redundant after spending his entire working life at the shipyards. That’s a devastating enough blow for anyone, but it’s what it evokes in Frank that makes this story both recognisable and heroic.

Economical direction by Gaby Dellal gives the unspoken, underlying subtext most effectively. Along with the grey, cold environment, it suits this taciturn man in a situation similarly affecting his friends and co-workers, suddenly cut adrift from an occupation with which he’s identified all his life. One of his mates accepts a demeaning cleaning job from a supercilious and unfeeling management. Another intentionally maims his hand in a machine, in a sickening moment of desperation in the face of a bleak future. Frank turns up at the employment bureau to the double indignity of having to hand his form in to his estranged, unemployed son’s wife Angela (Jodhi May), and the official who greets him knows it’s his first time there because Frank asks naively about a job instead of unemployment benefits. Without trapping us in too much gloom, the film manages to follow his downward spiral to a turning point hinged on the central tragedy of his life: a drowned son he was long ago unable to save, and that child’s twin, now adult with twin boys of his own, from whom he has distanced himself in guilt and fear of additional loss. The utterly mad idea which is big enough, and impossible enough to turn the tide of hopelessness and depression, is to swim the English Channel. The title refers to a comment one character makes, that on a clear day one can see France.

It’s in the way this idea first surfaces and then grabs hold, and the inspirational steps along the way – such as Aaron, the boy with cerebral palsy who swims at the pool where Frank trains so relentlessly, a child who puts everything he’s got into flailing himself across the pool and who never gives up – that the skill of the filmmakers and the actors shows. It’s very much something we can all relate to, and Frank’s reluctance about revealing his plan to his family, while increasingly appreciating the support of his gang of four friends, echoes his wife Joan’s (Brenda Blethyn) shyness to reveal to Frank that she is learning to drive a bus.

The ripple effect of Frank’s enormous effort spreads in an amusing and believable way to his family relationships and to his four friends, each of whom is less assertive than he could be, and who are each inspired to place more value on themselves through Frank’s example, with more hope for the future.

Peter Mullan is a translucent, textured Frank, well matched by Brenda Blethyn as his pragmatic, optimistic wife. Son Rob is played by Jamie Sives with effectively dark hunted look and a driven urgency to be a good dad to his own boys. Frank’s friends are Eddie (a solid Sean McGinley), Norman (played as a quintessential British clerk by Ron Cook, complete with cardigan and toothbrush moustache), Chan (Benedict Wong in a brilliant, understated depiction of a Chinese fish’n’chip shop owner whom no-one has ever heard speak, and who serially surprises everyone), and Danny (Billy Boyd, off-the-wall-funny in a nutty Scottish way).

Despite being set in Glasgow, this well-structured film has much of the genre of ‘small community full of quirky local eccentrics’, and succeeds well on this level without cheapening the jubilation, heart and inspiration one feels at its end.

© Avril Carruthers     10^th May 2006

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