Director: Luke Cutforth
Writers: Luke Cutforth and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
Based loosely on the Apollo and Daphne myth, Caroline Smailes’s novel receives the big screen treatment courtesy of director Luke Cutforth. The story of a boy who falls in love with a kind of water nymph is certainly atmospheric with Manchester’s Victoria Baths a key location in the film. Its elegantly decayed Edwardian glamour is the perfect background for a doomed relationship. The interior shots of the empty swimming pool and the peeling paint on the doors of the changing cubicles are desolately beautiful, but they can’t quite make up for the story’s silly ending.
Arthur is a 16-year old boy living with his alcoholic father, who does nothing but drink cider out of plastic bottles and watch TV. The father – Johnny Vegas, who also produces – doesn’t notice that his son is being bullied at school by Tommy Clarke and his minion Cliff. In one melee, Arthur’s trousers are pulled down and photos of his bare behind are plastered on school noticeboards and shared on social media. So humiliated is Arthur that he contemplates suicide by throwing himself off the local pier, typing in the words ‘has had enough’ on his Facebook page.
What stops him going through with it is the ethereal singing that he can just hear above the crashing waves. Lured like a sailor to a siren, Arthur follows the voice to The Oracle, the old swimming baths that are being knocked down to make way for a luxury spa. Breaking into the building after the demolition workers have gone, Arthur enters a semi-fantasy world where clean blue water has once again filled the swimming pool. In it is a naked girl who calls herself Delphina. She and Arthur fall in love.
The Oracle becomes his refuge from school where Tommy’s bullying has now turned violent, and from home where his father seems even more determined to drink himself into a stupor. Delphina offers Arthur love, but not much of a future because she can’t leave the water. He eventually joins her in the pool, but he can’t swim alongside her forever.
In Ovid’s version of the myth, Apollo pursues Daphne relentlessly despite the fact that she wants to remain single. As Apollo’s machinations become ever more imaginative and as he swoops in – now with wings – to capture her, she begs her father for help. Her father turns her into a laurel tree, a bittersweet escape. In The Drowning of Arthur Braxton, this transformation is referenced in the character Laurel who wanders The Oracle warning Arthur of man called Silver. Laurel also has tattoos of laurel leaves on her arm, an image that is nicely repeated in the earrings that Arthur remembers his mother wearing.
Cutforth’s film is initially intriguing, but the decision to explain the fantasy part and the mysterious disappearances of other teenagers doesn’t work, and the metaphors about growing up and forgiveness are submerged in an action sequence that feels out of place with the rest of the film’s tone. However, James Tarpey as Arthur is excellent as a teenage boy trying to figure out life when everyone – even his otherwise sympathetic art teacher – is against him. Vegas puts in a good turn as Arthur’s father, especially when his trademark shouty delivery becomes more gentle. And Ben Hawkey is very funny as bully Cliff, who has a penchant for the musical Cats. The female characters are less finely drawn, but Rebecca Hanssen does well with a role that is played entirely within water.
It’s a fine debut for Cutforth, and he deals with Arthur’s two worlds equally smoothly. He gives the school scenes a grisly authenticity and provides a sense of faded secrecy to the Oracle. It’s just a shame that some of the mystery is lost as the film wraps up.
The Drowning of Arthur Braxton is available on demand from 1 September.
