‘Bill Douglas: My Best Friend’ review: Influential portrait of a idiosyncratic director who died too soon

The recent death of Terence Davies and the tributes that followed – tales of iron will, passionate budget battles and a host of dream projects that never came to fruition – give this deeply personal tribute to Scottish filmmaker Bill Douglas additional and deeply moving relevance as ‘ a similar film. The story, now depressingly familiar in the British film industry, of an uncompromising talent who left us with a tantalizing promise of what might have been. Today, Douglas is largely unknown to the rest of the world, but holds Scotland close to his heart (despite abandoning his homeland at the first opportunity), and is the closest thing to a Rosetta Stone in recent British independent and social realist cinema. From his early home videos to his final three-hour masterpiece Comrades (1986), the director left an indelible impression that still feels shockingly modern today, leaving traces of Derek Jarman’s early Super 8 works to Lynne Ramsay’s. rat catcher and beyond.

Jack Archer’s film starts off a bit sloppy, introducing Peter Jewell as Douglas’ best friend since childhood. This friendship would prove to be both intense and enigmatic (Jewell insists it was platonic), as the film doesn’t really address Douglas’ resulting reputation as a pioneer of gay cinema. Yet it paints a seductive portrait of a troubled man born into troubled circumstances: Douglas’ rough childhood formed the basis of his historical trilogy – my youth (1972), My Ain people (1973) and My way home (1978) – but rather than fanning the embers of that traumatic time (perhaps because there are now few eyewitnesses left, and the slums of the area of ​​Edinburgh he came from) Archer points us to the portrayal in these films pushed long ago).

Having met as 18-year-olds during military service in Egypt in the early 1950s, Douglas moved with Jewell to London’s bohemian Soho district in the early 1960s, and it’s remarkable how much the couple saw themselves as the Beat Generation. before they documented. . Like the Beats, they also involved friends and neighbors in their dark films, and one wonders what Douglas would have thought of his Super 8 predecessor Kenneth Anger, with whom he shared a fascination with early film culture and show business. Unlike Anger, Douglas wanted to take his game to the next level, although this deft transition to ’70s features is rather lightly sketched here.

Nevertheless, there is a surprising number of archives, most of which show the artist at work, and images of Douglas poring over a typewriter next to an overflowing bowl of cigarette butts are both an expression of his determination as an artist and a prediction of his own premature death from pneumonia. Cancer in 1991, aged 57. Douglas appears to be a charismatic and rather photogenic character, and his resemblance to the young Alan Bates – or perhaps more relevantly to John Cassavetes – makes it surprising that he did not pursue an acting career himself. But as the film shows, Douglas chose Pasolini’s option and cast a young amateur named Stephen Archibald as his avatar in his autobiographical trilogy. Douglas’s instincts about the young tear proved eerily correct; for an example of Sliding doors In fact, despite the director’s attempt to intervene, his young alter ego ended up in prison and died six or seven years after Douglas, before even turning forty.

The film’s limitations are obvious, especially when Douglas’ meticulous compositions are used as reference, but Archer’s faith in his subject matter is influential in that his film doesn’t really need film professional testimonials from compatriots like Scot Ramsay and Dublin’s Lenny Abrahamson not. The short running time also leaves many unanswered questions, but that could be a plus for its longevity – after its premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival, where my youth won the Silver Lion in 1972, Bill Douglas: My best friend would serve as an informative companion piece alongside or in anticipation of a season bearing the humble signature of this true author.