If you hold sequences from a fixed camera position, often after they seem to have ended, and if you impose a structure upon your actors which they are then asked to flesh out with words themselves, you are possibly asking for mixed reviews.
But British director Jon Sanders, working within a budget that wouldn’t pay for a second-rate Hollywood star’s caravan, is following in the footsteps of the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. The approach is not new, just audacious in an era when patience is not something often demanded of today’s cinema-goers.
His subject is fractured relationships. Ken (Richard Vanstone) and Gillian (Anna Mottram, the director’s wife) are a couple in their sixties living in an old house near the Kent coast. They’ve been married 40 years but no longer like each other much. At Ken’s birthday party, where we see most of the guests are equally uncertain about their relationships, things come to a head. A speech about how the pair still adore each other causes Gillian to rush out into the garden. “Say something nice,” she has asked before, “Just one word!” “Beer,” comes his reply. She has finally had enough and the shouting starts.
Not without humour, full of irony and with a real feeling for disjointed lives, Late September may remind some of Joanna Hogg’s films. But Sanders, 69, who started out as a film editor and sound recordist, is his own man, though always working with Mottram, an actress who deserves to be better known. As should his films — Painted Angels, about a 19th-century Mid-West brothel, and Low Tide, about a dying woman. Perhaps Late September will do the trick.
