Tea and Dragons

This week having in the main sucked on ice, I am on Cape Cod drinking hot water with lemon from a tall mug hand-painted with a sea-green octopus and the call sign for WCAI. The hope for the next couple of days is a profound amount of nothing, with sea. I have already eaten some slightly fancy tinned fish.

Marooned (1994) closes with an assurance from ScotRail that under no circumstances except the exceptional are items of left luggage opened, which fortunately no one told the protagonist of this elliptical, a little noirish, just faintly magical realist and haunting short film.

Peter Cameron (Robert Carlyle) mans the left-luggage office at Glasgow Central, but in his solitude, his oddity, and the dreamlike circling of his days, he might as well be employed in the outer reaches of Kafka. Ceaselessly surrounded by human movement and direction, he shifts to the other side of his narrow counter to change up the crick in his neck. The clock cuts his hours out in claim tags and skeleton keys, the dip of a paste pot and the closing of his hand on the coins he's dropped as impersonally as a vending machine. His eyes are absorbingly dark, the thinness of his wrists in their rolled uniform sleeves gives him a furtive, vulnerable look from his covert of sports bags and suitcases, taking a mugging, an assignation, arrivals and departures all in. The caustic familiarity with which he can greet a commuter of prior scrutiny, "And where's the redhead? I thought you married her. Did she finally figure you out?" never makes it past the thousand-yard crease in his stoneface that can crumple into real petrifaction if he's caught outside his professional script. The nautical title seems a touch dramatic for the hub of a mainline station, however landlocked, but Peter as he makes himself a precisely arranged cup of tea while listening to the shipping forecast in the office's industrially riveted recesses does have a kind of marine overcast about him, a glass-greenish tint filtering his regulation pigeon-blues, the tea towel's plaid, the leatherette of the Roberts R200 serenely intoning its warnings of gales in Fair Isle and Rockall. When he unlocks and examines the contents of bags in his care, it seems less voyeuristically invasive than quizzically alien, as if trying on the idea of what it means to have a life that can be carried in cross-section anywhere its owner feels like. He always repacks them unnoticeably. It seems a very small existence, but we have no idea if we should even wonder how he feels about it until we learn that he had a clear other choice, one which perhaps ironizes that daily ritual of a brew-up with the Met Office. "Have you been to sea? Nah, I didn't think so. You're the only one that's not been. You're breaking the tradition."

What happens to jolt this recessive character out of his routine naturally involves some illicitly opened left luggage, but much of the pleasure of the small, slant plot that precipitates is how steadily it doesn't even seem to refuse the expected next move, it just stands aside at its own slight angle. It's no twist that a man who lives at such a second hand of other lives will have no defenses when one of them touches him directly, so deer-shocked by the appearance of the black-haired, sad-eyed Claire (Liza Walker) that even before he finds her suitcase filled with the evidence of the end of a bad affair, Peter misses a tongue-tied beat of the transaction, their hands holding the same receipt for such a momentous second that for once he volunteers information he doesn't have to—"I close at half past eleven." Even more than the off-duty sight of him outside the cavernously murmuring habitat of the concourse and climbing the stairs of a grottily sodium-buzzed terrace at that, it is a real shake of the kaleidoscope to have this isolated figure situated suddenly within the ties of a family, especially a brother as big and blond and laddish as the sometime merchant seaman Craig (Stevan Rimkus), boasting of his girls and their tricks while the slight, silent shadow of his sibling holds so still that his pulse can be seen hollowing the side of his throat. "I jumped ship in Port Elizabeth . . . I owe some guys rather a lot of money. Can you help me?" A tighter, more conventionally triangulated narrative could make more of these tensions, like the snapshot memento of a happier Claire wrapped playfully around a denim-jacketed Craig that queries her unfamiliarity to Peter. Marooned lets its uncertainties lie between characters who know their own histories and turns its attention instead to the consequences that skitter off more obliquely, as riskily compassionate as enclosing a first-ever note for a fragile passenger or as heedless as slamming into a fight that wasn't expecting a mad little coathanger of a man that can't normally get three words in order, never mind a crowbar. Afterward he looks just as worried as ever, flattening himself around a seedily lit kitchen on just the wrong trajectory to avoid the other person in it. If he's peeling himself off the sidelines of the life he has always screened through timetables and sea areas, stories observed in fragments or construed from odd socks and bottles of scent, he may not be much less awkward when he gets there. Where? Standing on the deck of the ferry Juno, wiping the windblown curtains of his dark hair out of his eyes as the firth and the fog churn past almost the same sea-sanded steel-blue, he's already difficult to picture fitting as neatly behind his anonymous counter as the first time we saw him folded there, consolations of the shipping forecast or no. In the end, the hardest thing he may have to do—or the easiest, when he finally sees it—is take his own advice.

Marooned was written by Dennis McKay, directed by Jonas Grimås, and BAFTA-nominated for Best Short Film in its year, which it would have deserved: it does not feel in 20 minutes like a sketch or a slice but an elusive, immersive hinge of time where we don't need the details of the past filled in to understand the weight of what has happened in the last few days. Dialogue-wise, it's nearly silent, but it's shot by Seamus McGarvey with such an Eastmancolor-soaked combination of cinéma vérité and slow-tracked tableaux that it has the intimacy of a photo album and something of the same selective quality of time, too, edited by David Gamble as if we had to be there to find out what happened between the snaps. Occasionally it reminded me of the short fiction of M. John Harrison and not only for the late sequence where nothing more than an ear-filling hum on the soundtrack, a splutter of tea, and a pair of stares that seem to meet through the fourth wall, one somber, one shocked, confirms a fact like a folktale. The score was composed and partly performed by Stephen Warbeck and it is minimal, modern—accordion, saxophone, bass—not hopelessly sad. Much of the rest of the sound design was contributed by Glasgow Central. I found it on Vimeo and was unable to get it out of my head. It looks at almost nothing straight on, which doesn't mean not deeply. So much of it happens in Carlyle's eyes, so dark and soulful that in another kind of Scottish story, they would clinch him as a seal. "I forgot about you for three whole hours yesterday, but then it started raining and you were back in the front of my mind." This relation brought to you by my only backers at Patreon.