Hidden City is an impressively professional piece of work for a debut
director. With a decade of television experience as a writer behind him,
Stephen Poliakoff has clearly learnt well from directors like Stephen Frears and Michael Apted, and draws excellent work from his actors. Charles Dance has rarely been better, giving a witty, commanding performance, and he combines well with Cassie
Stuart as the annoying, pushy Sharon. Most striking, however, is the visual
flair of the film, which offers up a convincing vision of a secret London while
pushing the narrative into the background. Like Michelangelo Antonioni in
Blow-Up (1966), Poliakoff is more interested in the trappings of conspiracy than
in the conspiracy itself.
Indeed, the film is heavily influenced by Blow-Up, not only in its conspiracy
plot but also in its portrayal of London as an almost foreign country. Poliakoff
and his cinematographer, Witold Stok, create an extraordinarily potent portrait
of an unknown world beneath the streaming metropolis which is, as Sharon says,
"so drowning in secrets that no-one knows which the important ones are anymore".
The locations are brilliantly chosen, and refreshingly unfamiliar - an ancient
piece of the London Underground, a vast subterranean chamber under Oxford
Street, the desolation of a huge landfill site. Poliakoff's next film, Close My
Eyes (1991), used Docklands in a similar manner. Another obvious influence on
the look of the film is Charles Sturridge's bleak filming of Poliakoff's
screenplay for Runners (1983).
Hidden City sees the emergence of a key theme of Poliakoff's later work: our
relationship with the past as revealed in film, photographs and assorted items
of ephemera. The idea that history can be discarded but never completely lost is
vividly illustrated here, as is the notion of reconstructing a 'secret history'
from items thought to have been destroyed. This theme is developed further in
Shooting The Past (BBC, 1999) and Perfect Strangers (BBC, 2001), where
photographs of the past are central to the narrative. The obsession with the
past means that Hidden City hasn't dated as badly as some films of the
mid-1980s, the main reminder of its era being the evocative electronic score by
Michael Storey.
Mike Sutton
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