Blue Bag Life
Lisa Selby’s unorthodox memoir deals with other people’s addiction in a very personal, highly original way.
Before viewing this film I knew nothing of Lisa Selby who is here telling us about her family and her own life and the role that addiction has played in that context. On learning that Selby was an artist – there’s a passing reference in the film to her working in clay when we see her in Hong Kong – I assumed that in the context of this film her wider artwork was purely incidental. But that is clearly not the case since online Selby, a lecturer in fine arts at the Nottingham School of Art & Design, is described as an artist whose work explores the theses of addiction, mental health, well-being and incarceration. Given that degree of social engagement in her art, it follows that, although she has not been involved in film before, this feature is very much to be seen as a crucial part of her output. It suggests that she must have been the driving force here and, indeed, in addition to being a key figure on the screen, she shares the writing credit with Josie Cole and co-directs with Rebecca Lloyd-Evans and Alex Fry.
Blue Bag Life is certainly not a conventional documentary, particularly if you associate the genre with talking heads. Whether or not the shooting style comes from Selby or her co-directors, there is a sense here of a freedom in the editing and in the use of camera angles more often encountered in fictional films while the way in which the narrative unfolds, moving back-and-forth in time and darting off here and there, is similarly unorthodox. How much that appeals may depend on the taste of the individual viewer. Selby acts as narrator voicing her thoughts and telling her story through footage that she has shot herself over the years. A scene to which she comes back repeatedly is that in which she last photographed her mother, Helen, a woman who had deserted her husband and walked out of her daughter’s life when the child was only ten months old. This recorded episode, one in which we hear Helen speak, finds her not only looking back on her past but talking frankly of her addiction to heroin. Within a year of that occasion Helen would be dead. That occurred in 2017 and it may be that it was both her mother’s death and subsequent events involving her partner Elliot that determined Lisa to turn the material that she had shot into the basis for this feature film.
Blue Bag Life is a title that refers to packages used to carry drugs, but viewed as a whole this is a film which is an autobiographical study as well as an examination of addiction as it affects not only the addicts but those close to them. The two fit together in that Lisa describes the film as a record of a troubled past made to enable her to make sense of it in a calmer time. A pre-credit sequence has her holding written questions to put to Helen and contains an avowal that "mum" is not a word that has any meaning for her – put these two details together and it's a combination which emphasises both how the early abandonment marked her and how it left her unable to put it behind her. The clearly precious footage of Helen also includes an appearance by Elliot and we learn that he and Lisa had met at AA and that she had quickly fallen for him. His claim that he had got over taking heroin may have impressed her, but she soon found that he was still involved with drugs and he would later serve a prison sentence for dealing. Nevertheless, she does not give up on him and perhaps couldn’t do so. Curiously Blue Bag Life rather sidelines Lisa’s father, but it does offer portraits of Helen, Lisa and Elliot from which each emerges as desperately needy - a state that may or may not also apply to Rose Morley who is also seen here and who became a surrogate daughter to Helen choosing to associate with her despite the state to which Helen had been reduced by her addiction.
If the opening scenes of the film blend old footage and present-day thoughts, one finds later episodes going further back to touch both on Lisa's childhood and subsequently on her troubled adolescence while other sections carry such labels as "Six months before the death”. A theme which is appropriately developed late on is whether or not Lisa’s early experiences will continue to confirm her desire not to be a mother herself. However, the jumping around elsewhere can be a limitation (late on Elliot's early life comes up having been ignored until then, but what we learn feels incomplete). All told the film feels disorganised, but if its threads emerge too haphazardly and incompletely for my own taste (Lisa’s art and its place in her life are hardly mentioned) others may find its informality appealing. Over and above that, anyone with experience of addiction may well feel that the film is valuable for reflecting so honestly issues that they themselves have faced.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring Lisa Selby, Elliot Murawski, Paul Selby, Rose Morley.
Dir Rebecca Lloyd-Evans, Lisa Selby and Alex Fry, Pro Natasha Dack-Ojumu, Screenplay Josie Cole and Lisa Selby, Ph Lisa Selby, Ed Alex Fry and Rebecca Lloyd-Evans, Music Dana Wachs and Astrid Sonne.
Tigerlily Productions/BFI Doc Society Fund/BBC Storyville-Modern Films.
92 mins. UK. 2022. UK Rel: 7 April 2023. No Cert.
