Writer: Leigh Campbell from a concept by Melanie Manchot
Director: Melanie Manchot
With Stephen Melanie Manchot, who conceived and directed the film, blends factual footage with reconstructed / fictionalised scenes to test the boundaries of what can be achieved in a documentary format.
The audience is thrown in at the deep end, a lengthy pre-credits sequence involves archive/ black and white footage and present-day scenes set against a disconcerting soundtrack (from Matthew Barnes AKA Forest Swords) of industrialised percussion bashed out against metal. Gradually it emerges that the first time a factual event was reconstructed on the screen in a documentary was the 1901 arrest of Liverpool bank clerk Thomas Goudie who embezzled £170,000 (the equivalent of roughly £22 million today) to feed his gambling addiction.
In the present day a new film version of Goudie’s story is planned, and Stephen (Stephen Giddings) is auditioning to play the title role. Art is imitating life as, although not mentioned in the documentary, Giddings was previously involved with one of director Manchot’s video art installations and found the experience so empowering he became involved with acting.
However, audition scenes in which Giddings addresses the audience direct through the camera, demonstrate parallels between his life and that of the character he hopes to play. Giddings comes from a family of addiction sufferers and is himself a reformed gambler who attempted suicide. The point is elegantly made as Giddings, during his audition mixes his name with that of Goudie, becoming Stephen Goudie or Thomas Giddings, as if unsure which character is which or if there is any distinction. The use of a story from 1901 also demonstrates gambling addiction is a problem society has failed to resolve in the past rather than a new issue.
The auditions are not simply verbal, some take the form of song or blank verse, and there is the overriding sense of lived experience coming from those involved.
As the film progresses, the factual auditions fade and fictionalised/ re-enacted scenes from the new film biography of Thomas Goudie appear. This development is not announced and only becomes apparent when characters begin to refer to Giddings as ‘Tom’ rather than ‘Stephen’.
Stephen is a film full of ideas but not all of them clear. The purpose of a dancer on a street corner or of Giddings changing his clothes while striding through a housing estate is vague unless the latter is to suggest a change of character. Some of the scenes become clumsy in an effort to make a point. Giddings becomes moved and breaks off from an argument in character as Goudie because the issues raised are so close to his personal circumstances.
Stephen does not glamorise gambling. Giddings’s addiction is rooted in childhood insecurity, compensating for the absence of a father figure by trying to behave as an adult. The actual process of gambling is squalid, rather than a high-flying casino the card game takes place in the storeroom of a run-down shop. But if the setting is seedy the stakes are high with bets rapidly running up to £25,000. Michelle Collins has a strong cameo as a hard-faced loan shark and Stephen’s humiliation is excruciating to witness losing not just the equivalent of a year’s wages but also his dignity. The compulsive nature of gambling is, however, apparent in Giddings’s response to his loss – a mixture of self-justification and self-aggrandisement notably refusing to take any responsibility for his own actions.
The radical approach taken by Melanie Manchot avoids the ‘mockumentary’ format which has become a bit tired. The blend of factual and fictionalised footage works on an intellectual level demonstrating the compulsive and self-destructive nature of gambling. Addicts by their nature are selfish and their interests shallow – a point made as the fictionalised Goudie moves from planning to buy a home with his girlfriend to cadging her savings to fund his habit. Stephen is, therefore, an imaginative approach to making a documentary and a convincing portrayal of people with whom it is not easy to sympathise.
STEPHEN will world premiere in the International Competition at Sheffield Doc/Fest on 16 and 18 June 2023.
