Wondering where to begin in recapping my travels — this past week has been a WHIRL of course — The Fall: Futures and Pasts was amazing and Tarot Cultures was magical and then there was more Leonora (even more than expected!) and friends and good meals and so much — so I need to get organised and do a bit at a time until I have caught up.

…with things over the last two years (eek!)

But for now, let’s start with something easy: a film review. I saw posters for Savage House and guessed from the imagery that this would be a black comedy. Perhaps it was, but neither I nor anyone else in the theatre was laughing. It had a fabulous cast — not only Claire Foy and Richard E. Grant but in excellent roles Jack Farthing (best known as Freddie Threepwood in Blandings; I could not place him at first as the two roles could not be more diametrically opposed) and Bel Powley. I had seen the written and directed by credits, but I didn’t realise the editing and music also all done by Peter Ganz, about whom I know nothing and will not be investigating further. I’m not sure of the machinations or perceptions of ‘genius’ behind the scenes that led to this cast being employed at the whim of this director (etc), but I do wonder. One often assumes Scientology connections, but who knows.

Without giving too much away, the general outlines: a rich family where a social climber married a titled woman with fortune and immediately squandered all is desperately trying to stay afloat when they receive a random reprieve by way of a visit from the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. Make a good showing and their recovery is assured, so they pledge what they have left to make a spectacle. Meanwhile the two remaining staff members — each sexually liaising with their masters — secretly plot to kill off one or both of the household and take what’s left of the fortune. The daughter, innocently obsessing about astronomy and the forthcoming eclipse, has mice instead of dolls.

There is meat for good and savage comedy here. It’s all wasted. We’re supposed to believe that Grant’s Savage is a canny climber who wormed his way into high society and made Foy’s lady fall for him (she claims so later in the film), but he is so utterly charmless and such a lackwit, you can’t believe it. His terror of falling back into his ‘rightful’ class is believable enough because everyone not noble is portrayed as imbecilic and filthy. There’s a mean-spiritedness that pervades the film that is not employed to any useful end, such as skewering the predatory extractive class or deflating the ridiculous excesses of eighteenth century frippery.

Not to quote Bergson at you (so I’ll paraphrase) but comedy is communal: we laugh together at some absurd human behaviour. There are absurdities a-plenty in this film but we don’t laugh because they only offer disgust, underscored by a current of fear. We need a point of sympathy and there is no character to sympathise with: perhaps the daughter though she is not a character but rather a random bundle of actions. You’d think there would be an obvious ‘the rich are repellant’ theme to use but the subtext seems to suggest instead that the lower classes should not aspire to their betters — and usurpers must be punished. Read the room, director.