Negative Space

I don't know if Sidney Lumet ever read the work of the architectural critic Ian Nairn - given that Roger Ebert is a fan, it's not too unlikely - but his 1972 film The Offence seems to pick up on one of his critiques of the post-war New Towns. All that space, a reaction to the grimy bustle and overcrowding of the East End - from which many of the inhabitants of these towns came - became something weird and disturbing. In Modern Buildings in London, he writes of how the grid pattern combined with these areas where nothing particular happened meant that 'there is always the awful moment when you suddenly come to the end and meet a howling desert'. Personally I've always liked these howling deserts; I write as someone deeply aggrieved when Alexanderplatz was built over, and the most interesting element in, say, the 'Learning from Milton Keynes' series linked to by Fantastic Journal is not the banal architecture, but the banal space - the voids, the flyovers, the embankments.

They are deeply weird, these voids, and Lumet's film is all about them. Filmed in Bracknell, The Offence is the story of a policeman who has a nervous breakdown and murders a serial child rape suspect (with a surprisingly harsh performance from Sean Connery), and like Get Carter it uses the stark lines of post-war architecture as the stable referent for casual violence and barely suppressed rage. The policeman rents a flat in Ove Arup's Royal Point, seen in shockingly bare profile after a horrible domestic quarrel, harasses a suspect in one of those two-level shopping centres you could find in Stevenage or Coventry; and in the brilliant opening sequences, winding closes of unornamented council houses skirt around a huge thing too neat to be a heath, too bare to be a park or a wood, searching for a missing girl; the use of this useless, negative space gives the film much of its cold, uncanny power. Not mean streets, but pinched plazas, mean public spaces, psychotic concourses.

It would be deeply unfair to damn a film as powerful as The Offence for making a point - postwar planning = alienation - made much less stylishly or convincingly by innumerable others. So maybe Lumet's film needs to be watched alongside Gregory's Girl. This is such a romantic version of the new town that it's a wonder Bill Forsyth wasn't receiving a direct stipend from the Cumbernauld Development Corporation. The notorious town centre can only be glimpsed once, from a distance - the rest of it uses the different layers, pedestrian bridges and unusual housing arrangements as a playground, an awkward, gauche but charming site for gawky adolescent crushes. Everything is 'new', and not as a pejorative - new feelings, new ideas ('a girl on the football team - it's modern!'). As the film ends, with Gregory, having been moved from girl to girl and ending with Clare Grogan, it's on one of those voids, not-park, not-wood and not-garden that they lie, thinking about the world spinning round as gravity holds them to the surface.