SEAT AT THE BACK: "DOOMED FLAVOURS" // THE CINEMA OF ANXIETY OF NICOLAS ROEG (1928

I was a teenage film geek . . stuck in the heart of countryside Kent (a folk horror landscape of corn fields and dark woods; shooting spores of solitude at me — like a Nic Roeg-filmed puffball, fully enraged).

I would stare out of a cobwebby bedroom window: at dust raising, crop worshipping, young weary farmers, passing me by on their monstrous old tractors (before nights in the pub around a crackling log fire); at scheming, slender, prying local girls on nasally-challenged horses, training for dressage, doodling in the air with their all-surveying eyes; at lonely, wandering, water diviners, promising secret underground streams to find below ground, or offering snatches of healing wild heather to glue up broken hearts, or ease the troubled mind (but mainly just to ward off some witches).

To get through long nights of insomnia and stones being thrown at my bedroom window at great force by angry tree-dwelling goblin folk (also known as The Great Storm of '87) I would sneak upstairs to a darkened living room late at night, to watch films by such provocatory British directors as Ken Russell, Michael Winner, Derek Jarman (or Brian De Palma — not so British!) and Nicolas Roeg, as they were my favourites (and all came a little bit forbidden — and risky).

Somewhere, back home, I still have a fat bulging midriff of a cardboard box full of VHS tapes with the most kick-head bits on from these late night movies, including Roeg's — recorded in a clip-like frenzy for posterity (and in case something like DVD didn't get invented a few years later).

I still do. Follow the same directors. And they still are — risky, forbidden . . Except now — I don't sneak (as much). I prefer to stream the best bits together, rather than try and press the chunky red record button down smoothly enough not to suffer a 5 second delay in my teenage montage of cinematic intoxication (although Jagger's bathtime mixed with Bowie's big alien reveal and Agutter's Outback dehydration on whirry old tape reel: what a rush to the brain cells that was).

WALKABOUT, screened at the BFI in 2011, was a sweltering March night of big screen survival. Jenny Agutter and Roeg were both on stage for a Q&A after, Agutter remembering rushing along to her audition for the film straight after school had finished. A film that was, totally, and fortuitously, all about a practical, and sensible schoolgirl (well — mostly sensible, at least 'BMB': 'Before Meeting Boy') and her little annoying brother — alone and lost in the Australian Outback.

Agutter turned up to her audition still wearing her school uniform as there was no time to change (it ended up being her dress code for the movie). She knew, by the way that Roeg looked up at her as she walked in, that everything had just clicked into place — here was Roeg's forever unnamed protagonist, standing right in front of him — and that she'd definitely got the part.

ROGUE WORK

Roeg, on stage, remained politely passive at this reminisce from Agutter: not a flicker of a smile as the audience chuckled, or even a slight nod of the head. Like so many of his films, the man himself appeared (to me, always) mysterious and just a little bit dangerous to know; passive but fully loaded and ready to explode; brooding with a bright, inner light, often hidden, and the master of the sexually charged slow burn — and of the forbidden (and the sexuality in some of his films, such as PUFFBALL or DON'T LOOK NOW and the depraved, disjointed and wonderfully disturbing TRACK 29, is like a virus, or an intoxication — of the forbidden). This is a director wild, unpredictable, wired and enigmatic — just like all his films. He seems, at times, strangely resigned. And he also had the coolest name of all too. He was his name. He is, still — ROEG!

From the wild countryside and ear-battering drench of rumbling farm equipment, endlessly ploughed or sprayed fields and deafening bird scarers to the frantic, creative, loud urban sprawl of the streets: Roeg's films gleefully often combine both sides of the lucky/ unlucky spin of the coin. Beauty is always in everything: in concrete, countryside, chaos, sex — and death (the almost balletic death of the girl's father in WALKABOUT an unforgettable image). In PUFFBALL, if you want that critic-loving description of folk horror in great big clouds of pollen, wicker and sperm: you got it.

Sounds of nature (also especially in WALKABOUT, where nature is always noisy) are as invasive and exhilarating as they are in the cab culture of BAD TIMING — outside the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Juxtaposition of city life in WALKABOUT between Sydney and the Australian outback is cemented by death by a bullet. The alien's abandonment of crumbling familiarity and family back home and absorption into corruption (liberation?) here on Earth provides a heady balance of arid endless landscapes and urban claustrophobia, of adventures in wide open spaces and lives as rats in a cage (in the case of Eureka: one rat in one cage, awaiting the bringer of death . . ).

My favourites of Roeg's films: PUFFBALL (rural magick and insemination of the body — a jaw-dropping tease to the senses), EUREKA (dark, violent, oversexed, tragic); BAD TIMING (unexpected everyday lust, laced with stuffy cobwebs of the soul and unseen, unfathomable threat, and foe); WALKABOUT (hot, sweaty, open pore panic and survival of the youngest and a meditation on the power of siblings and the outbreak of adolescent lust) and PERFORMANCE (his first — co-directed with Donald Cammell) where you get to feel what it's like to be a groupie and play sex games with Jagger and friends in a bohemian mansion, taking wild, lazy and everlasting baths with Michèle Breton (impossible to ever forget . . ) and Anita Pallenberg (oh, and Jagger) and filming it all on an 8mm camera (looking into the lens of which mirrors the same gaze into the barrel of a gun — the mise en shot) and simultaneously forgetting that you're also in a thriller, of sorts, with an ending. PERFORMANCE is weird. But good weird.

Other favourites: CASTAWAY (the magnificent Oliver Reed spends a year on a deserted island with volunteer companion Amanda Donohoe that ends up being authentically disturbing both on screen and off — everything goes tummy up and both actors look increasingly close to actual death, but especially Reed, who was probably the closest: a delirious and worrying movie); THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (Bowie plays a Bowie that's just landed on Earth: I can never forget the scene where the alien terrifies an earthling so much that she urinates in front of him — this is a film, like WALKABOUT and PERFORMANCE, that literally gazes into the alternative universe of a mirror image, but in this case, adds otherworldly interpretation) and DON'T LOOK NOW that started the 'did they or didn't they' obsession in erotic cinema after Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie get it on at the expense of their daughter — also done some 36 years later by Lars von Trier in ANTICHRIST (and possibly, even, AMITYVILLE 3D).

Also coming fully lubed with hot towels and a happy ending (no spoilers!) is FULL BODY MASSAGE — a heavy breathing TV movie starring Mimi Rogers that's developed something of a cult following over the years and comes chock full of (hey: surprise!) slippery massages and (hey: more of a surprise!) spiritual meditations on the mysteries of life. Basically pretty much all Roeg's films remain golden nuggets of cinematic flair and authentically original vision that stick to the brain and stay there. You can pick and choose your own favourites — or just nab all of them!

Actually, PUFFBALL, BAD TIMING, and WALKABOUT are the Roeg films I probably do feel the most obsessional about right now (yeah — it changes). EUREKA too, but maybe I'm biased as that was a first time see on the big screen and 'the one that I had somehow missed'. It became a sudden favourite — you can't help but identify with the desperation and loneliness of Hackman's initially unsympathetic Jack McCann as his world collapses around him. Those wide, wild eyes of sadness just melt the heart. The violence is hard to watch here. And the sex, all surreal and as glittery as gold, seethes with approaching tragedy as the dark side of the heart beats quicker with a crackling, swelling rage - as possibly mismatched, sudden and probably stupid, but as equally, undeniably sizzling as it is in BAD TIMING and DON'T LOOK NOW. Welcome to Roeg's unique and quietly deafening, cinema of anxiety. Don't ever try to leave. You won't get far . .

Especially intoxicating is EUREKA's slow meditation on the nature (the shittiness) of fate (where everyone stabs everyone else in the back all the time: or where dog eats dog every day) and effortlessly rides with the melancholic, unstoppable nature (the 'doomed flavours') of friendship, love and 'bloody' family gone bad.

The screening of EUREKA at the BFI was introduced by the man himself. Roeg didn't say much. He looked surprised we'd even turned up! But also seemed pleased that we had. Think: lesser known Roeg then, but still scaldingly stylish, often dirty as a recently dug up chunk of fool's gold (Rutger Hauer and Theresa Russell smoulder and crackle) and pockmark rough (it's based on a true story). Gene Hackman could well have you in tears by the end. And I've never forgotten some of the imagery: that hole in the ice, and the snow globe. I'm sure the BBC's LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN borrowed that same snow globe as seen on screen here and took it back to Royston Vasey with them.

Here's a flashback link to our review of EUREKA as it first appeared at SEAT AT THE BACK, as a tribute to such a much-loved director and cinematographer who dared to be different and show tainted life in gorgeous, breathing in of colours. Who explored the darkness within us all with such a rush to the head of light. One of the great provokers of British cinema.

Always . .

Always: looking into the mirror, backwards.