Not to even slightly disrespect the astoundingly variable
and adaptable iconoclasm of Jerzy Skolimowski’s body of work, but it’s hard to
discuss his film The Shout without acknowledging (in its blurring of
myth and reality, its drawing on sexuality, the deliberately disorienting
editing structure) a recurring feeling of Nicolas Roeg-lite. With that out of
the way, the film ultimately stands on its own, albeit perhaps best categorized
as a curio, but an utterly fascinating one, most absorbing (and often amusing)
when at its most English, with an extended depiction of a cricket match that
takes place on the grounds of a mental hospital (the snatches of conversation
from the old-timer spectators almost feel Pythonesque), and drawing on the
rhythms of village life with its shepherd and cobbler and the
minimally-attended church at which one of the characters is the back-up
organist (rushing away afterwards to rendezvous with the cobbler’s wife). The
film’s core narrative draws strongly on the contrast between Crossley, the eccentrically
dominating, perhaps supernaturally endowed character played by Alan Bates, and
the married couple on which he imposes himself, with John Hurt’s Anthony almost
seeming to exist only so can be pushed around and marginalized, and Susannah
York maximizing her capacity to suggest the carnality that might underlie an
unassuming country girl prettiness. The film skillfully weaves a zone of
intertwining attributes and influences: myth and madness, intelligence and bluster,
iconoclasm and criminality, Englishness as a comforting lattice of ritual and
tradition and as a blanketing layer of denial and wilful blindness; it’s as
attentive to sound as to vision, with Anthony working in his home studio on
experimental music, a timid counterpoint to Crossley’s claimed (and perhaps actual)
ability to generate a shout that can kill. The film is often as alluring in its
silences though, whether they be bucolic or eerie.
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