“Ray & Liz” Finds Unexpected Poignancy In Familial Dysfunction
An old man awakes from a restful sleep. His dreams possibly interrupted by a roll of thunder and the increasing intensity of bulbous raindrops tapping at his single bedroom window. He sits up, lights a cigarette, and quenches his thirst on tar coloured homebrew. His thinning hair a shade of grey mirroring the bleak storm outside, his aged skin like crumpled paper that’s been unevenly flattened out. When the weather brightens, he tentatively manoeuvres the sun-bleached netting from his high-rise view, unlocks the window, and peers pensively at the world outside. Later, cocooned in this characterless abode, he gives a leaflet featuring the image of Jesus Christ a moment of consideration, lays it to rest against a mirror, and retires back to bed to start the whole routine again.
Richard Billingham’s 2018 film is a semi-autobiographical drama inspired by his experiences growing up in a Birmingham council flat in the 1980s. The eponymous Ray and Liz (Justin Salinger and Ella Smith) are his parents; an out-of-work couple living off what little the state gives them and the last remnants of Ray’s redundancy money. The pair’s children, Richard seen first as a 10-year-old then later as a teenager, and his younger brother, Jason, roam relatively freely amongst the decrepit walls of their grimy home and graffitied streets. Liz is preoccupied with simple pleasures like knitting or doing jigsaws to while away mundane days while Ray, the observant husband, is seemingly tethered under Liz’s embattled wing.
But there’s love in this house. It isn’t plain-faced and straightforward. Rather it’s in the way Ray affectionately boils Liz’s milk for a late-night drink. In this home, love is shadowed by bleary-eyed anger and bitterness, the permanence of anxiety and sadness, and that morning’s hangover. But it’s there, between the discoloured wallpaper and the dog’s puddle of urine. One moment Liz is threatening Ray’s wayward brother Lol (Tony Way) with a punch for daring to drink any of the house’s alcohol, the next she’s reaching for her last few pounds to buy her eldest son some new shoes while reminding Lol there’s a roast pork dinner ready for him to warm up in the oven.
Billingham, a seasoned photographer whose film takes its cues from his 1996 book, Ray’s A Laugh, which features a series of photos documenting his life with his parents, is understandably adept at telling this story visually. Dialogue is sparse throughout as this unflashy drama episodically goes back in time, firstly to a recollection of Lol getting blind drunk while looking after two-year-old Jason, and then, a few years later, Jason going missing for three days during a bitterly cold winter.
Gaining intimacy from the writer-director’s use of the Academy ratio, Billingham’s uncluttered square frame is deceivingly detailed. The economy by which he portrays 10-year-old Jason’s desperate hunt for stimulation (putting chilli powder in his father’s mouth while he sleeps, keeping pet snails in a plastic tub under his bed, dropping a porcelain figure from a high-rise window) reveals an exquisite eye for visual storytelling, wordlessly conveying feckless adolescence. But Billingham stops short of condemnation, instead admiring the fortitude of the child to take it upon himself to break free of the tedium. A sign of self-sufficiency born out of his parents’ resignation; hope appearing out of hopelessness.
Ray & Liz is a moving portrait of an impoverished family in 1980s Britain. Writer-director Richard Billingham’s decision to frame this story around the recollection of a father dreamily — and drunkenly — recalling previous life events gives the film an unexpected poignancy that, instead of emerging from tragedy or regret, has an uncomfortable sense of fatalism. It’s fitting that past and present ultimately blur, Ray’s simple, circuitous existence dented from time to time by Liz’s iron fist and her demand for his leftover dole money.
Watch Ray & Liz now via Amazon Prime Video.
Discover the photographs that inspired the film in the book Photographic Realism: The Art of Richard Billingham available on Amazon here.
