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Earlier this week, a friend alerted me to some amusing and unexpected news: Steven Knight’s maudlin-macho-melodrama Locke (2013) has received a French remake, with the gruff, leathery Vincent Lindon (Bastards, Titane) cast—pretty perfectly, I reckon!—in the Tom Hardy role.
This reminded me that, back in April 2020—the early days of the pandemic—I actually wrote in some depth about Locke for the Reverse Shot journal. Around this time, I was also interviewed by the brilliant film critic Mark Asch about my then-job as director of film programming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and how it had been affected by the pandemic. Needless to say, four years on, both pieces read as pretty sobering time capsules of a genuinely surreal and challenging moment. I have republished the Locke piece below, and I have opted to do so entirely unedited. Enjoy!
Brooklyn Academy of Music, where I work as director of film programming, temporarily closed its doors on March 14th, days before the start of “Programmers’ Notebook: On Solitude”, the latest edition of a recurring series I’d organized with my department colleagues. The premise of this infrequently recurring series is simple: for every incarnation of these Notebooks, each of us selects a handful of titles in response to a chosen theme. Given our present circumstances, the theme of solitude—a condition into which we’ve all been rudely thrust, to varying degrees—now seems both weirdly prescient and tragicomically apt. I had been particularly looking forward to sharing with an audience a film that was due to screen March 25: Steven Knight’s Locke, which has long fascinated, amused, absorbed, and moved me.
I first saw Locke at the Venice Film Festival (remember film festivals?) in September 2013, where it world premiered out of competition. I knew little going in, guided only by assumptions. I’d seen its charismatic star Tom Hardy incarnating various burly roughnecks in films like The Dark Knight Rises, Bronson, and Lawless, while the one-word character title put me strongly in mind of Monkfish, a sketch from ‘90s BBC comedy The Fast Show, which proffered a spot-on parody of the proliferation of laughably brusque, hard-nosed cops in dramas on British television in that period. I relaxed into my seat, anticipating a blast of tough, uncompromising macho business. What I got was… well, what the hell did I get?
Hardy is Ivan Locke, a well-respected builder who, at the film’s open, abandons the biggest job of his career—the largest non-nuclear facility, non-military concrete pour in European history, no less!—to drive from Birmingham to London in order to be present at the birth of his child, whose mother happens to be a one-night-stand that he barely knows. The remaining 84 minutes of this 85-minute film take place inside Locke’s car, at night, as he navigates escalating familial and professional crises with the use of only his car phone and his imagination, all while battling an insistent sniffling cold. Locke, you see, is married with kids and, despite being lashed to the highway in his BMW, has no intention of giving up on coordinating the concrete pour. Like many of us now, Locke is working remotely, under duress.
Beyond Locke’s rare status as a British road movie—as I type, only Chris Petit’s beautifully bleak Radio On (1979) comes to mind as a true contender—it is genuinely weird stuff, floating in some liminal space between mundane (a philandering, car-bound concrete merchant with a cold?) and radically experimental, not least in its resourceful formal execution. The film was shot using three digital cameras simultaneously, which were kept constantly rolling while a phone line attached to the car allowed off-screen actors—a heavyweight cast of voices including future Oscar-winner Olivia Colman, future Spider-Man Tom Holland, and future Fleabag “Hot Priest” Andrew Scott—to dial in from a conference room. The scenes were filmed in real time, with no pauses for reshoots, and Knight and team effectively shot the whole film twice nightly, for eight nights, breaking only to switch the cameras’ memory cards every 27 minutes. This immediacy is fully apparent in the imaginatively shot and edited finished product, which hurtles by in breathless, relentless style.
But really, this is the Hardy show, and he’s never been better, commanding the screen with a bracing force that hasn’t subsided for me over multiple rewatches. He’s armed with a sonorous Welsh accent that sounds like Tom Jones with a sprinkle of New Delhi (though it transpired that the man Hardy based his accent upon turned out not to be Welsh at all.) Between sniffles, Hardy rolls his ‘r’s and crunches his consonants, delivering, with thunderous glee, absurd lines that make him sound like some sort of urban planning neo-colonist:
“Do it for the piece of sky we are stealing with our building. You do it for the air that will be displaced, and most of all, you do it for the fucking concrete. Because it is delicate as blood!”
That line in particular always makes me laugh like a drain, and Locke’s blustering insistence on the crucial importance of his concrete mission at times pushes the film into borderline camp territory. (I think here of Notes on Camp/Anti-Camp, an essay by radical queer filmmaker Bruce LaBruce that envisions entire new categories of camp, including “Reactionary Camp” [Tyler Perry, heavy metal] to “Bad Gay Camp” [Neil Patrick Harris, Liberace], and “Bad Straight Camp” [Benny Hill, Damien Hirst]. Let’s call Locke “Cismale Concrete Camp.”)
Yet Locke is neither a parody, endorsement, or trenchant critique of so-called toxic masculinity. Rather, it’s an especially piquant portrait of a peculiarly maudlin, self-serving strain of British manhood, one that is obsessed with fixing things, proving oneself, and always being the focal point of any emotional matrix. (Locke says “I” a hell of a lot, but, crucially, devastatingly, never once says the words “I’m sorry” to his betrayed family.) Painfully acute, too, is its depiction of the relationship between Locke and his soccer-fanatic sons, where emotion and meaning are sublimated into the coded language of sports.
Fortunately, I have a better relationship with my own father than Ivan Locke has with his (he appears to address his ghost in the rearview mirror in several vituperative, Shakespearean monologues), or seems destined to have with his own kids. Yet my dad and I, too, for so long—too long—skirted around our emotions, the real stuff, and stuck to surface level conversations, like men are wont to do. But I’ve used this lock[e]down period to finally get around to interviewing my dad, who turned 60 last year. We recorded our first hour-long conversation last week. I want to know what he was like at my age; I want to know what drove him then, what he regrets. I want to know what he doesn’t know, and wants to know, before it’s too late. Locke, in its blunt, headlong way, reminds me that intergenerational relationships need to be actively worked at, and that masculinity, or at least the performance of a certain type of masculinity, can be a destructive, deadening force.
During this shelter-in-place period, I’ve watched Locke twice already, both in the Netflix Party format, and it’s been pleasant to share my affection for the film with others even outside a cinema. It seems there’s a fair few out there who are similarly smitten with its unusual blend of melodrama, humor, bleakness, and technical élan. Over time, Locke has become my comfort film, my warm blanket, a trip I relish taking. Most of all, I do it for the fucking concrete, which, as we all know by now, is delicate as blood.
Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
Brilliant