Long Way Back
Brett Harvey’s father/daughter drama is further proof that Britain is big enough to be the setting for a road movie.
The opening of Brett Harvey's Long Way Back finds a middle-aged man sharing an intimate drink with a woman and talking in an obsessive way about pop music. His comments are not surprising since we soon learn that this man, David (Tristan Sturrock), has himself long been the member of a band. However, we discover virtually nothing about the woman (Kate Edney) and the film promptly moves on as though in response to a message which David receives from the phone of his daughter, Lea (Chloe Endean). No details of the message are given to us. However, we next see David waking up in a parked car after which the film cuts to show him collecting 19-year-old Lea from her university in Manchester in order to take her on the long journey back home to Cornwall. He talks to a woman in authority before leaving, but we do not hear their conversation so it remains unclear why Lea is packing up. What is apparent is that she had expected her mother to fetch her and regards her father as an unfortunate replacement because they have become estranged. She does not welcome talking to him, but their shared journey - all the longer for including a detour to Wales – will inevitably lead to conversation. For the viewer that will give some insight into how David's music had taken him away from home and caused him to become a bad father. Remembering other films about parents and children brought together in comparable circumstances, we wonder if their time together on the road will mend their relationship.
Given that Brett Harvey is a filmmaker based in Cornwall and that most of Long Way Back was in fact shot there, it is hardly surprising that this piece has been linked with the most famous film from that region to emerge in recent times, Mark Jenkin’s Bait (2018). Harvey’s piece is far from being as adventurous in style as that film was, but it is nevertheless a work of some originality confident enough to move at its own pace, pleasingly photographed in colour and ’Scope by Adam Laity and with a cast who give it their all. That being so, I wanted to warm to it and it saddens me that I was unable to do so because the film left me feeling decidedly distant.
It is quite possible that viewers whose own life experience makes it easy for them to identify with either David or Lea will be drawn in despite Harvey’s decision not to flesh things out. The talk in the car may eventually shed some light on their past history, but there are few flashbacks to bring it to life. That may in itself be a wise decision, but it does put extra reliance on the screenplay creating characters that feel truly individual and authentic. All of that was achieved by Harry Macqueen in 2020’s Supernova which was also something of a British road movie but here there's none of that film’s precision and detail. The portrait that emerges feels generalised and the film is too ready to hold back information. Thus it's late on before we discover anything much about the woman in that first scene, Rachael, and only after her time on screen is over do we learn that another and older woman visited in Wales (Susan Penhaligon) is not David's mother as we might suppose but in effect a foster mother.
Harvey’s portrayal of the road journey is realistic in tone although at intervals soundtrack songs by Luke Toms are added which, specially composed for the film, are designed as comments on the story that is unfolding. A return to the Wookey Hole caves in Somerset, scene of a family visit when Lea was only six or seven, adds to the length of the journey but it seems an unlikely diversion given that Lea having been so young can hardly recall it. The film’s use of another site, that of the Nearly Home Trees, is more relevant in that it memorialises past ties to Cornwall. But, while the journey will be completed, Long Way Back opts without warning to look at things from an entirely fresh angle and that, far from being revelatory, feels like a contrivance. It confirmed my sense that the film does not work for me, but I have to respect it as an endeavour by Brett Harvey to pull off a film with a vision personal to him. With luck there will be viewers far more able to succumb than I was and, as I have suggested, that may most readily happen among those who recognise something of themselves in the father/daughter relationship depicted.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Tristan Sturrock, Chloe Endean, Susan Penhaligon, Kate Edney, Robyn Collins, Simon Harvey, Lola King, Edmund Rowe, Esther Hill, Andy Lindley, Dan Harvey.
Dir Brett Harvey, Pro Simon Harvey, Screenplay Brett Harvey, Ph Adam Laity, Art Dir Hana Backland Ed Brett Harvey, Music Matthew Thomason and Luke Toms.
O-Region-606 Distribution.
93 mins. UK. 2022. UK Rel: 2 September 2022 Cert. 12A.