Four Lions (2010)

"Waj, why are you doing this?"

"Rubber dinghy rapids!"

I've resisted reviewing any outright comedy for this blog so far, film or TV, for the obvious reasons: trying to analyse humour is about the most po-faced thing I can possibly imagine. I don't really hold to the oft-repeated belief that you ruin a joke by looking at how it works, but it's still hard to do it without appearing to have no sense of humour and, as John Cleese once said, an Englishman would rather be accused of having a really small penis than that.

Still, I've reviewed quite a few films now, and I can't keep ignoring a whole genre. I have to find some way of talking about it. And it isn't that I haven't found humorous things to discuss before (Flash Gordon, for example. Actually, that's a comedy, innit?). So I've deliberately decided to have a go. Originally I was going to review Kind Hearts and Coronets, but I had to give up five minutes in as there are no subtitles on my DVD and the dialogue just isn't clear enough to compensate. I'm a bit pissed off about that, really; a DVD release without subtitles is not acceptable.

So, Four Lions. It's a brilliant film. But the first thing I have to say is: DO NOT BUY THE DVD. Just record it off the telly or something. The DVD forces you to watch about ten minutes' worth of trailers that can't be skipped. Any DVD that does this has to be boycotted, otherwise they'll just keep on doing it.

Crikey. Got out of the bed the wrong side this morning, didn't I? Anyway… I picked Kind Hearts and Coronets so that I'd be able to talk about the class subtext instead of trying to analyse jokes. This was my second choice, obviously, because there's a political subtext to talk about. Thing is, though, there's not an awful lot to say about it, cleverly done though it is. All sorts of taboos are cheerfully ploughed though, as you'd expect from Chris Morris, but it's funny for rather old fashioned reasons. The format is basically that old classic, thick bloke and thicker bloke. The three thicker blokes (the Stan Laurels / Buttheads / Garths / Syd Littles, depending on your cultural reference point) are Waj, Faisal and Hassan, and the two thick blokes (the Hardys / Beavises / Waynes / Eddie Larges) are Omar and Barry. There's a bit of an added level of this between these two, jostling for the spot of alpha male, but it's Omar who's ultimately the least thick, and the leader. Of course, though, the humour lies in the fact that they're all wazzocks. This is co-written by the creators of Peep Show, and feels like it.

It's Omar and Barry who are fleshed out more as characters. Omar has a loving wife and young son, and the family relationships are quite heartwarming. Yet his wife is enthusiastic for Omar's plans to blow himself up, and their son is being brought up to idolise jihad and martyrdom. His brother Ahmed, a far more observant and pious Muslim than Omar, who is forever referring to Western pop culture, is appalled at all this, yet we can't quite side with him as he's such a zealot that he locks his wife up in a "little room"! So many contradictions.

Barry, although charismatic, is a little semi-detached because of his white ethnicity, his convert status and his lack of Urdu. I suspect this, rather than anything else is the real reason why he refuses to attend the mosques (he wants to blow then up!) and prefers only to associate with other Muslims who accept him as one of them, not an outsider, which pushes him towards extremism. He doesn't quite belong anywhere, precisely because of his stubborn adherence to a particularly narrow version of "Islam". So many contradictions.

And it's the contradictions that make this film so funny. Barry accuses Omar at the end of killing his thick brother by dragging him into this, but he did the same himself with Hassan. Waj ends up about to blow himself up inside a kebab shop full of Muslims. Omar and Waj go to train with Al Qaeda and end up blowing up Bin Laden. And Omar blows up a branch of Boots, something which he's mocked earlier.

There's something almost Monty Python about the explosions, too. All of them, from Faisal's crow to Faisal himself to Barry's choking demise are very, very funny. It goes to show that the subject matter, being fundamentally absurd, is ripe for humour. I'm glad that a film like this exists, and that it's good.

Black Mirror: The Entire History of You

“Not everything that isn’t true is a lie, Liam.”

This is so, so clever. It takes a central conceit (what if you could play back your memories at any time via a “grain”, either in your head or on a screen to others?), and then turns it around and examines it from every conceivable angle. And some of the consequences are huge.

In some ways, Liam and Fi live in a very recognisable middle-class world of appraisals and dinner parties, but their world is subtly different, with very little concept of privacy or civil liberties. You can’t get on a plane without having your memories scanned. You can’t even report a serious crime to the police without providing identification. Children can retrospectively sue their parents for disadvantaging them through a poor upbringing. These people don’t live in anything vaguely resembling a free society; the “grain” makes that impossible.

The crucial exposition, which underlines the way the “grain” works, is the big dinner party scene, and this is underlined, of course, by the fact that Liam plays back parts of it so many times. The character of Helen, who chooses to go without a “grain”, is more or less the control in this experiment, and the voice of the viewer, generally speaking. The reasons behind her abstinence are, of course, horrifying; to be “gouged” (interesting word!), and to have the chip containing a perfect record of all your memories stolen, brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “identity theft”, and is about as terrifying a thing I can imagine. But Helen’s philosophical perspective is interesting, and is a microcosm of the play’s theme; perhaps it’s a good thing that our memories should be fuzzy and unreliable, as this allows us to cope with life.

This whole theme is illustrated by a simple tale of sexual jealousy. Because he can “re-do” this dinner party conversation as many times as he likes, Liam comes to suspect (correctly) that Jonas, a somewhat crude character whom he dislikes, is his wife’s ex. He’s able to indulge his increasing obsession by analysing every little thing and discover truths that should have remained unburied. Things spiral to the point where he drinks and drives, starts sounding much more Northern, commits a serious violent assault, crashes his car, comes to doubt that his daughter is his own, and has a massive row with his wife. Eventually he’s driven to remove his “grain” in way seems a rather painful way. All of this is relatively straightforward and even, as far as the conclusion is concerned, even a little underwhelming and lacking in impact.

But none of that is the reason why this is such a brilliant play. It’s the little things that underpin it all. Sex, for example, is completely stripped of meaning. We see what seems to be a sex scene with Fi riding Liam, but it’s then revealed that they’re both reliving the memory together, and finish by having very real orgasms. The line between sex and masturbation has become blurred. This being the case, when Jonas replays the memories of sex with Fi, it feels to Liam as though the other man really is sleeping with his wife. Sex may be devalued (as made clear by Liam’s big speech at the dinner party), but sexual jealousy is magnified hugely.

No one has any privacy; Liam is almost forced to play out the scene of his appraisal at the party. Life is much more stressful, as there is no much more opportunity to obsess over slights. The play is a warning, I suppose, of the need for civil liberties to keep up with technology. There are reasons to be very fearful that they won’t.