CHROMOPHOBIA Interview

Laura Smith talks to Martha Fiennes and Ben Chaplin.

CHROMOPHOBIA, the second feature from Martha Fiennes, had its long overdue UK premiere at the Cambridge Film Festival last night. Debuting in Cannes back in 2005, the film has had a frustratingly fraught journey to finally reach a British audience, something Fiennes understandably found a discomforting experience. “Until the film is out, I’m not quite restful,” she tells me, “it’s like it has been waiting in the wings and no one has seen it in the country in which it was made and about which it is written.”

Yet Fiennes’ film is exactly the kind of filmmaking that is all too rare in Britain these days: it’s an aesthete’s visual feast – all vivid, dazzling intensity and pulsing hues. The film’s composition is at times dreamlike, almost futuristic – its distinctiveness hits you from the first frame. Fiennes’ confident debut, ONEGIN, was a wistful, sumptuous costume piece, – Merchant Ivory meets Sofia Coppola – emotion unleashed by a bleak but beautifully realised period milieu. CHROMOPHOBIA is stridently contemporary: stark monotones and shimmering spectrums undulate amid vividly recognisable settings – stately country piles, run-down urban squalor, bespoke, antiseptic architecture.

“I do think it has got a really clear visual language,” says star Ben Chaplin, “for a British film it’s very unusual…I think it looks almost European.” Fiennes acknowledges her distance from a British cinematic tradition, so long polarised between the lush, Laura Ashley aesthetic of Merchant Ivory and the gritty realism of Loach, Leigh et al: “I don’t feel English in my interests, my sensibilities,” she admits. Yet even in this increasingly multinational, multifarious filmmaking climate, there is a definite reluctance, both critically and commercially, to support films that fall outwith the comfortable dichotomy of commerce and arthouse.

Films like CHROMOPHOBIA suffer because they do not fit comfortably in a particular category. The cast is starry but it’s essentially an independent feature, more at home in the auteur-friendly, culturally diverse European cinematic tradition (significantly, the film was released in France long before it reached the UK). “I do think that you’re playing a game in this business,” Fiennes confesses, “you’re forced to choose between the commercial game where you’ll get that respect, or the vulnerability of arthouse.” It’s an uneasy balance to attempt, and the film’s difficult route towards distribution is testament to an industry unwilling to take risks.

“I thought I was writing a really commercial film,” says Fiennes, “anyone can label it what they want, but for me as long as it has ideas and it’s entertaining, and feels original…I just think things are either good or they’re not good.” If only it were that simple. Originality of vision, visual dynamism, personality-inflected orchestration – all these elements make for interesting, vibrant cinema, but signal alarm bells for The Money. “I remember talking to a Hollywood executive I know quite well,” recalls Fiennes, “and I said really passionately ‘Isn’t ‘blahblah’ a really great movie!”, and her response was “yeah, but it did shit at the box office.’” There’s the rub, as the director laments – “we’re all battling against this… dare you try, and what is success and what is failure, and what’s the barometer.”

Typically the barometer is Hollywood – will it travel, will American audiences ‘get it’. Everything else is ‘specialised’, as Kenneth Branagh noted at our preview of AS YOU LIKE IT – another film that has suffered from a limited budget and an unsympathetic marketplace – there is no middle ground. Ben Chaplin is unequivocal in his praise of Fiennes, but voices his frustration on her behalf: “the problem is that when a film is delayed in release, the press jump on it as if to say, well, there must be a problem therefore I’m going to perceive one, and that’s just not the case with this film at all.”

It’s not a film without flaws – the narrative structure at times feels derivative of its more assured American predecessors, the ensemble nature inevitably leads to some story strands seeming superfluous. But Fiennes has an instinctive grasp of her medium, and a real sense of the potential of cinema to capture something essential, something intangible.  “Arthouse,” Fiennes says, “is a four letter word, the way people talk.” It’s time we got away from these polarised distinctions, this cinephobia that shies away from innovation and risk. The fear of colour is a telling motif – as Fiennes says, “It’s all shades, shades, shades, for everybody: different realisations and journeys and everything is interconnected – it’s just not black and white, is it?”