Daniel Zimbler's Exit (2012) closely follows its oft-anthologized source material by Harry Farjeon, which means it's a twelve-minute creep-out for Christmas accomplished through the softly radio-tested expedient of simply speaking something dreadful into existence, or out of it, as the case may be.
The smartest tweak of the screenplay from the short story concerns the character of the mysterious Mr. Geeles, on whose supposed knowledge of "de-creation" rests the difference between a good fireside shiver and the queasily seamless reweaving of reality. "Well, it doesn't interest me to bring a rabbit out of a hat. I'm more interested in the process of putting one back . . . I should put it back so completely that you would never have had it at all." On the page, he's a more conventionally sinister figure with his watchfulness and his disconcerting voice, his papery age itself a kind of memento mori at the double holiday of a Christmas wedding. Played with genial modesty by the robust white-haired Julian Glover, Mr. Geeles on film is disarming rather than offputting, a family friend of a vintage such that the bride's uncle can remind the younger generation a touch mischievously as well as instructively, "He's been to places you couldn't even imagine. Seen some queer things." He's introduced absently brushing off a spill of brandy, the quietest of the seven guests left to pass the time in the grey-watered afternoon until the newlyweds with their hands inseparably twined and their eagerly teasing argument about settling in the country or the city depart for their honeymoon in Paris; he's heard from first in an affable attempt to redirect the best man, whose toastmaster jesting has slipped a personal gear since the ceremony and is grinding the conversation to awkward halts. He has none of the stonefish overtones of Farjeon's Geeles, lying in wait to unsettle. If anything, he seems content with his peripheral part in the company, an accustomed witness to its coziness and frictions, which makes it that much weirder for his center stage to involve, to begin with, a matter-of-fact explanation of the distinction between a murder, which still leaves behind the traces of a life, and the process whose theory he outlines, which emphatically does not: "You would be sponged from the page of human history. Not even your memory would remain."
( Where are you? Who are you? Who were you? )
I would have read Farjeon's "Exit" in one of the innumerable school anthologies in which I was always supposed to be reading some other story—neither the author nor the title stuck with me, but the conceit lodged like a bad dream, instantly recognizable decades after the fact. Its own history is slightly elusive, broadcast before it was published and co-credited in both instances to Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, although without access to any earlier version I have no idea what the text of the short story was "adapted for broadcasting" from. There does exist a one-act play, but its script was not apparently used the one time the material was adapted for television. What blows my mind is that it never seems to have been adapted as a radio drama. As a short film, a short story, even a short story read out over the air, there is a protective layer between the incantation of the process and the audience, the fourth walls of third person omniscient and mise-en-scène. Done straight for radio in unquotated voices, there would be nothing to stop the audience from being included automatically among the number of people who might disappear just from listening to Mr. Geeles, which is so existentially freaky that it seems impossible no one took advantage of it. It is an almost definitional voice-in-the-dark story. It is a tribute to its strength as an uncanny narrative that it makes such a good film when it could have scared the pants off its audience just by handing a copy of Best Broadcast Stories (1944) to Julian Glover. DP Adam Etherington gives the location shooting at Layer Marney Tower the flatness of a washed-out winter's day, the most unnuminous of lighting schemes, but at the height of the process splits briefly, engulfingly into a kind of lepidopteran psychedelia, sound-designed by Alexa Zimmerman and co-edited by Zimbler and Ulysses Guidotti as if its containing shadows have been sliced out of time. The music by Fabian Almazan is somber and wandering, the same color as the tapped-out light until it darkens. The small cast is rounded out by Maggie Robson, Edward McNamee, and Keith Hill, but Coleman struck me so vividly with his face like a snide faun's and his admirable commitment to a Gulf spill of brilliantine, I was chagrined to discover I had last seen him as Ponder Stibbons in Sky One's Hogfather (2006); it made me feel I owed him a film unrelated to Christmas. This one I got from Vimeo after re-reading the short story, its nightmare fuel unimpaired. Of the Farjeon siblings, Harry was the composer, but if he had to make one literary contribution, what a beaut. This process brought to you by my best backers at Patreon.
The smartest tweak of the screenplay from the short story concerns the character of the mysterious Mr. Geeles, on whose supposed knowledge of "de-creation" rests the difference between a good fireside shiver and the queasily seamless reweaving of reality. "Well, it doesn't interest me to bring a rabbit out of a hat. I'm more interested in the process of putting one back . . . I should put it back so completely that you would never have had it at all." On the page, he's a more conventionally sinister figure with his watchfulness and his disconcerting voice, his papery age itself a kind of memento mori at the double holiday of a Christmas wedding. Played with genial modesty by the robust white-haired Julian Glover, Mr. Geeles on film is disarming rather than offputting, a family friend of a vintage such that the bride's uncle can remind the younger generation a touch mischievously as well as instructively, "He's been to places you couldn't even imagine. Seen some queer things." He's introduced absently brushing off a spill of brandy, the quietest of the seven guests left to pass the time in the grey-watered afternoon until the newlyweds with their hands inseparably twined and their eagerly teasing argument about settling in the country or the city depart for their honeymoon in Paris; he's heard from first in an affable attempt to redirect the best man, whose toastmaster jesting has slipped a personal gear since the ceremony and is grinding the conversation to awkward halts. He has none of the stonefish overtones of Farjeon's Geeles, lying in wait to unsettle. If anything, he seems content with his peripheral part in the company, an accustomed witness to its coziness and frictions, which makes it that much weirder for his center stage to involve, to begin with, a matter-of-fact explanation of the distinction between a murder, which still leaves behind the traces of a life, and the process whose theory he outlines, which emphatically does not: "You would be sponged from the page of human history. Not even your memory would remain."
( Where are you? Who are you? Who were you? )
I would have read Farjeon's "Exit" in one of the innumerable school anthologies in which I was always supposed to be reading some other story—neither the author nor the title stuck with me, but the conceit lodged like a bad dream, instantly recognizable decades after the fact. Its own history is slightly elusive, broadcast before it was published and co-credited in both instances to Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, although without access to any earlier version I have no idea what the text of the short story was "adapted for broadcasting" from. There does exist a one-act play, but its script was not apparently used the one time the material was adapted for television. What blows my mind is that it never seems to have been adapted as a radio drama. As a short film, a short story, even a short story read out over the air, there is a protective layer between the incantation of the process and the audience, the fourth walls of third person omniscient and mise-en-scène. Done straight for radio in unquotated voices, there would be nothing to stop the audience from being included automatically among the number of people who might disappear just from listening to Mr. Geeles, which is so existentially freaky that it seems impossible no one took advantage of it. It is an almost definitional voice-in-the-dark story. It is a tribute to its strength as an uncanny narrative that it makes such a good film when it could have scared the pants off its audience just by handing a copy of Best Broadcast Stories (1944) to Julian Glover. DP Adam Etherington gives the location shooting at Layer Marney Tower the flatness of a washed-out winter's day, the most unnuminous of lighting schemes, but at the height of the process splits briefly, engulfingly into a kind of lepidopteran psychedelia, sound-designed by Alexa Zimmerman and co-edited by Zimbler and Ulysses Guidotti as if its containing shadows have been sliced out of time. The music by Fabian Almazan is somber and wandering, the same color as the tapped-out light until it darkens. The small cast is rounded out by Maggie Robson, Edward McNamee, and Keith Hill, but Coleman struck me so vividly with his face like a snide faun's and his admirable commitment to a Gulf spill of brilliantine, I was chagrined to discover I had last seen him as Ponder Stibbons in Sky One's Hogfather (2006); it made me feel I owed him a film unrelated to Christmas. This one I got from Vimeo after re-reading the short story, its nightmare fuel unimpaired. Of the Farjeon siblings, Harry was the composer, but if he had to make one literary contribution, what a beaut. This process brought to you by my best backers at Patreon.
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