Red Road (2006)

Jackie works as a CCTV operator. Each day she watches over a small part of the world, protecting the people living their lives under her gaze. One day a man appears on her monitor, a man she thought she would never see again, a man she never wanted to see again. Now she has no choice, she is compelled to confront him.

Director:

Andrea Arnold

Writers:

Andrea Arnold, Lone Scherfig (characters),

Stars:

Kate Dickie, Tony Curran, Martin Compston

20 wins & 7 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Kate Dickie	...	Jackie
Tony Curran	...	Clyde
Martin Compston	...	Stevie
Natalie Press	...	April
Paul Higgins	...	Avery
Andrew Armour	...	Alfred
Carolyn Calder	...	Cleaner
John Comerford	...	Man With Dog
Jessica Angus	...	Bronwyn
Martin McCardie	...	Angus
Martin O'Neill	...	Frank
Cora Bisset	...	Jo
Charles Brown	...	Broomfield Barman
Annie Bain	...	Aunt Kath
Frances Kelly	...	Woman in Denim Skirt

Storyline

Whilst working as a CCTV operator in Glasgow's working-class Red Road estate, Jackie sees a face from the past, a face that she thought would no longer haunt her dreams. Keeping her distance, and with the use of her CCTV cameras, she follows the face and the man and she finally decides to confront him. It is here that past lives are once again entwined and reconciliations are aired.

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Plot Keywords:

cctv | crying | title directed by female | apartment building | bare breasts | 

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Genres:

Drama | Mystery | Thriller

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Certificate:

Unrated

Details

Official Sites:

MySpace Verve Pictures [uk]

Country:

UK Denmark

Language:

English

Release Date:

27 October 2006 (UK)

Also Known As:

Crvena cesta

Filming Locations:

Barmulloch, Glasgow, Strathclyde, Scotland, UK

Box Office

Opening Weekend:

$17,009 (USA) (13 April 2007)

Gross:

$153,432 (USA) (6 July 2007)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Advanced Party Scheme, BBC Films, Glasgow Film Office

Technical Specs

Runtime:

113 min 113 min

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Red Road is the first of three films made at the behest of The Advance Party, a Danish project inspired by Lars von Trier, who challenged Arnold and two other new directors to create films with the same group of characters.

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Goofs

The video screens in the surveillance centre do not show the date and time, which would severely limit their usefulness as filmed evidence in real life. The date and time have clearly been disabled to avoid continuity errors in filming. The 'shadow' of the numbers is however visible.

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Quotes

Clyde: Do you know what I wonder about you?
Jackie: What?
Clyde: How your cunt taste like.
Jackie: [looking at Clyde blankly, not being surprised at all]
Clyde: Shocked?
Jackie: [blankly] Not really.

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Connections

Followed by Donkeys (2010)

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Soundtracks

"Morning Glory"
Written by Noel Gallagher
Performed by Oasis

User Reviews

Bleakly Optimistic

• A female cctv operative discovers in the course of her work that a

criminal has been released from jail early for good behaviour. She takes a very personal interest in him..-

That rare thing. A superb British movie. Set in an unremittingly bleak Glasgow focused on a multi-storey housing estate in the East End of that city, this is NOT the usual kitchen-sink or slice-of-life telly-style drama that nearly always make a disheartening prospect for cinema-going. This is a complex character-driven piece, beautifully shot and edited. Scenes are allowed space and time to breathe in their own life. It never tells the audience what to think, how to feel, or even what's going on. Yet ultimately the movie tells of a struggle against loss and grief and there is a redemptive quality which is hard-won by the director. The surveillance aspect is brilliantly handled by mixing in low-res grainy footage of surveyed scenes scanning and zooming in on actual streets (and some of the locals) and allowing the audience to figure out what is going on along with the operative. It suggested a knee-jerk parallel with Haneke's Cache (Hidden), but this a completely different take more closely paralleling Coppola's 'The Conversation' and suggesting that the effects of surveillance may be more acutely felt by the observer than the observed. The acting by the entire cast is pitch-perfect. The highly explicit sex scene is, for once, completely warranted and the sexual tension in the relationship is reminiscent of Roeg's 'Bad Timing'. But this is a film which gains a lot of power by being deeply-rooted in its time and place and doesn't need to look back. Utterly assured and contemporary, like 'Morvern Callar', it is very much what is happening NOW. And whenever the journalistic blah about a boom in Scottish film inevitably subsides, the country will be left with something more potent than bloody 'Gregory's Girl' as a benchmark for what can be achieved with a small-scale budget and Scottish/Scotland-based directors.