Local Hero · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man sent to buy a beach starts picking things up off it. Not surveying it, not pricing it — pocketing shells, and whatever the tide has left, until by the last reel he is carrying that rubbish home to a Houston apartment with a view of nothing. Nobody in Local Hero says out loud what has happened to Mac MacIntyre. Bill Forsyth just lets his pockets fill.

Mac arrives in Ferness with an assignment as clean as any thriller's: acquire the village. Beach, houses, harbour, the lot, so that Knox Oil and Gas can build a refinery. That is the oldest working shape in movies, and Gilles Deleuze gave it a name — the action-image in its large form, where a large situation bears down until a man acts and transforms it. Sheriff, outlaw, town. Executive, village, contract. Forsyth assembles the machine carefully in the first twenty minutes so that you can watch it quietly fail.

What fails is the link Deleuze called sensory-motor: perceive, act, resolve. Mac sees his situation with perfect clarity and loses the ability to convert it into action. He changes his mind about the deal too late and, more to the point, without authority. Nothing he does moves the plot an inch. The refinery is stopped by a whim from the top of the tower: Knox meets Ben on the sand, looks up at the sky, and decides he would rather have an observatory. Deleuze called this collapse the crisis of the action-image, and he found it in postwar Europe, in neorealism, in people who witness something enormous and can do nothing adequate about it. He was writing about grief. Forsyth arrived at the same structure through comedy.

That is why the lens earns its place here. It stops you calling the film charming and leaving it at that. Structurally Local Hero is strange: the protagonist's decisions are irrelevant to the outcome, and the community this genre exists to make resist instead wants the money and haggles hard for it. Denis Lawson's Gordon runs the hotel and the accountancy practice out of the same room, so hospitality and negotiation become one activity — Deleuze's gest, a posture that lays bare a social relation. The only immovable object is Ben, who cannot be bought because he does not want anything, which is far harder to argue with than principle.

Once the action circuit is cut, other things flood in. First, mess. Deleuze's terms are the dispersive situation and weak links: many characters, loosely connected, events that decline to add up. The injured rabbit. The punk couple. The motorcyclist thundering through. The African minister, and the Russian trawler captain who crosses the border between blocs more easily than Mac crosses the gap between his job and his feelings. Michael Bradsell cuts it slowly for a comedy, letting jokes arrive at conversational speed and frequently refusing the reaction shot that would confirm one had happened. Many of the gags are indices of lack: the funny thing occurs at the back of the frame or outside it, and you assemble the situation from a fragment. That ellipsis is a whole grammar, and it is why the film improves on a second viewing.

Then, in place of action, looking. Deleuze's word for an image with nothing to do but be seen is the opsign, the pure optical situation. The aurora is the film's pivot, and it is staged as an event to be witnessed rather than a special effect to be admired: weather, wonder, and a row of people who can only stand there. Mac has become a seer rather than an agent. Riegert plays him flat, and the flatness is the performance — a face holding a feeling it never discharges into an act, which is Deleuze's qualisign, the icon of pure quality. Lancaster does the same thing with stillness at the other end of the world.

Chris Menges makes it legible as light. He came out of documentary and out of Kes (1969), where long-lens coverage in available light held actors at enough distance that performance registered as behaviour, and he brings that grammar into anamorphic scope. From Days of Heaven (1978) he takes the magic-hour discipline of building a schedule around a narrow golden window, and adapts it to a latitude where the window lasts for hours. The result is dead time: stretches where the plot does not advance and the day is simply held. Bazin is the right company here. The wide frame keeps village, harbour, sea, sky and people in one image and refuses to cut to tell you what matters, leaving the ambiguity of the real intact and the choosing to you. And the scope frame keeps opening upward. That is the Open in Deleuze's sense: the feeling of a whole that is changing and will not fit inside the shot.

The debts are specific. Mackendrick's Whisky Galore! (1949) supplies the community as collective protagonist, defeating an outside authority through polite non-refusals and logistical delay rather than confrontation, which is exactly how Ferness wears Mac down. The Maggie (1954) supplies the American businessman ground down by attrition and schedule slippage; Forsyth borrows the machine and inverts the ending so the outsider converts instead of merely losing. I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) gives him weather and tide as active narrative agents, and figures scaled tiny against the coast so that place dictates the delay. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953) gives him the seaside comedy whose jokes live in the depth of the frame and in the ambient track of surf, gulls and harbour machinery. Forward, the shape ran for decades: Waking Ned Devine, Saving Grace, the eccentric-community strain generally, and Northern Exposure most conspicuously. Scotland also stopped being a heritage backdrop. Ferness has a Soviet captain in the bay and punks on the road, and the Scottish cinema of the 1990s has this film in its prehistory.

Which brings us to the last shot. Houston: Mac empties his pockets of shells, pins his photographs of the village to the wall, and Forsyth cuts to Ferness at night — an empty street, the phone box ringing, nobody coming. It has become an any-space-whatever, a place that has stopped being a setting for action, and the ringing is addressed to an absolute out-of-field, a person who cannot be located anywhere near the frame because he is in the wrong hemisphere. Knopfler's theme carries what none of them managed to say. The film ends on a connection that does not complete, and declines to tell you whether Mac ever gets back.

Comedies are not supposed to be allowed that. Forsyth's invention was to run one on drift instead of drive, and then to withhold the reunion the drift had been earning, and audiences went with him anyway. Watch it again for the edges of the frame, for whatever is happening behind the person who is talking, and for how long Menges lets the light stay before a cut. The film leaves Ben's question open, and it is not a small one: what do you do about a man who cannot be bought because he wants nothing? Knox Oil and Gas never works it out. Forty years on, neither has anyone else.