In a change of pace, here’s something that may or may not be a film technically, but I’m going to refer to it as such anyway. The Marriage of Reason & Squalor is based on the book of the same name, and directed by the author of said book; Jake Chapman, who together with his brother Dinos (who was one of the composers of this thing’s music) was amongst the increasingly misnamed YBA set from the ‘90s. Of course, whether or not his artist credentials are a good thing are for you to decide. Anyway, I haven’t read the book, though there’s a copy of it hanging around the house somewhere; it’s ostensibly a parody/satire of romance fiction, originally labelled under the mock branding ‘Mills & Doom’ until legal got involved. Apparently Mills & Boon don’t have a sense of humour about themselves. To be fair, I haven’t read any M&B so I wouldn’t know if the parody is on point. Also, I have no idea how seriously M&B stuff tends to take itself, so maybe they do have a sense of humour for all I know. I do know someone who’s written stuff for them, so I could ask, but do I want to really? That’s by the by, the film apparently differs vastly from the book, seemingly keeping the main premise and then veering off into other territory entirely, though I believe it starts out very differently, so if you’re familiar I suppose it’s obvious from the get go. As such, I guess it doesn’t matter too much.

The case concerns one Lydia ‘Chlamydia’ Love (Sophie Kennedy Clark). Engaged to the wunderkind consultant surgeon, Dr Algernon Hertz (he’s always ‘doctor’, despite being a consultant), who in a fit of poor medical ethics is also her actual doctor and has recently given her the operating on of a lifetime, he uses his fabulous surgeon money to buy her a tropical island for a gift, which our comedically monikered heroine goes to check out, as one does. He can’t go with her, he’s got to do medical stuff, so she’s hanging about on this volcanic isle with the locals who aren’t hugely impressed with this honky chick claiming her old man owns the island. Unable to get much help off of them, she sets about fixing up her suite for when he does come, and gets to picking a nice bouquet of flowers to brighten up the place when, wouldn’t you know it, she finds herself up the volcano. Exhausted, she enters a conveniently located house to ask for assistance where she finds Helmut Mandragoras (Rhys Ifans), a devilishly unattractive and misanthropic writer and philosopher, with whom her dear Algernon has a mysterious and troubled history. She finds herself intrigued, but somehow his sway over her does not seem entirely natural. The game is afoot for her heart. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe she’s drunk during her hen-do. Maybe she’s still in the hospital. Maybe she’s somewhere else entirely. Someone or something is pulling her strings as realities bleed into one another. Her body is falling apart quite literally, and the world too seems to be rotting away.

While released in the UK as a miniseries, the thing was reportedly conceived as a film and was shown theatrically abroad (and also at some British festivals) as a single entity. One assumes that the funding was contingent on being able to divvy it up into parts; this was after Sky’s old dalliance with making original films, but before their new dalliance with it (well, I’m pretty sure the new one has just been buying into stuff that’s in the works anyway with no particular input, but that’s not relevant now). Though the whole thing runs sans breaks to a bit under 90 minutes, and Sky Arts shows quite a lot of things in two hour slots, including ads, so it doesn’t seem out of the question that they could’ve just aired it as such rather than in four half hour chunks, which is itself an unusual choice for what is ostensibly a drama in this day and age. Still, its brevity means that, unlike a lot of film edits of miniseries, there’s apparently not much different beyond some material bookending the episodes that wouldn’t make sense in a film context. Presumably this means the credits sequences, which differ in each episode, and perhaps the fake ‘previously on’ sections that do little to reflect the actual content of the previous episodes.

The film has a rather low rent feel. While some of this is almost certainly budgetary; Sky probably weren’t going to put that much into something intended for their arts channel, though they clearly put some into it as there was location shooting in Barbados; the overwhelming falseness of the island locale does seem very much the point, with an abundance of studio settings, saturated colours, blue screen and back projection, along with crisp video quality combined with grainy archive footage in a way that’s blatantly deliberately obvious (a choice moment includes characters pointing out a bird off screen, then cutting to some grainy black-and-white film stock). Indeed, the location shooting was apparently predominantly just to use as background footage in the studio. There’s method to this madness; it helps lend the affair the feel of an old timey romance film, befitting the mangled Gothic romance upon which the story in hung.

The film itself is full of subtle touches and jokes, on top of the more obvious stuff (such as the ludicrous character names), with a lot of attention to detail in making up its absurd world, walking a fine line between beauty and ugliness. There is the question as what, if anything, is real within the world of the film; while we might assume Lydia’s island adventure, torn between a handsome but detached man and a beastly yet passionate one is not ‘real’, but the myriad realities the film presents have questions to be asked and inconsistencies even within themselves. Even Lydia herself is not immune; she does not retain a consistent persona throughout. We’re privy to her internal monologue, but she has more than one, competing not just for the audience but for her own self. The diffident Lydia is at odds with Chlamydia, the romantic heroine; a self-assured, confident woman whose hair and make-up are always perfect, even when she’s being ravished! The thing even goes into soft focus when she materialises. Indeed, the entire mise en scène is very careful with regards to how it reflects her mental state. The inconsistency plays a large role in the film’s foundation; can you remember everything that happens? The film has recurring threads, but their content doesn’t remain the same. That not everything may be reliable is laid bare when Lydia’s narration appears typed on screen as she gives it except some key words are very different indeed. The film forms a fascinating puzzle box.

Also, on top of the general artificiality, this has both puppets and animation in it. It’s everything I ever wanted. The bit with the puppets uses the theme from Rainbow. Wonderful.