“Hell is – other people!” is an infamous quote from Jean Paul Sartre, the French philosopher and novelist. Mind you, I think Sartre missed something there. The full quote should be: “Hell is – other people at the cinema!”
I am at City Screen in York to see Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man. Cillian Murphy, star of the TV series, again plays Tommy Shelby in Steve Knight’s Brummie gangster saga.
It’s mid-afternoon and the previous screening is finishing. I wait with the River Ouse behind me. The cinema is where the newspaper was when I came to York in 1988, with the features department just down the corridor, next to leaky windows through which the wind blew.
I think about those days for a while. Then the audience starts to leave, seeming cheerful enough and chatty, a good omen perhaps. One of those departing says in a booming voice: “Well, I knew that…”
He spurts out a giant spoiler.
This is ironic as before the film starts, there is a short preface from Murphy asking us not to give any spoilers. Perhaps that man hadn’t been watching.
What he said can be filed under accidental verbal spillages. It’s what happens next that raises that Sartre quote, taken from a one-act play called No Exit that I cannot pretend to have seen. It features three characters newly arrived in hell who have to interact with each other.
Funnily enough, it is three characters newly arrived in the cinema who almost ruin this screening. The cinema is about a third full. During the adverts and trailers, there is talking from the three. Sadly, infuriatingly, they keep up the chat when the film starts. They appear to be drunk.
Various members of the audience make shooshing noises, one or two walk over and ask them to be quiet. Instead, they keep on talking, one loudly. A member of staff arrives and asks them to behave, but they take no notice. Some people, in hell or elsewhere, have unstoppable gobs.
This continues and a few people leave the auditorium in disgust. After a while, the film is stopped, leaving Tommy Shelby frozen on the screen. The lights go up and more cinema staff arrive. The disruptive crew are told they must leave. The woman, middle aged or probably older, shouts and complains. She has trouble standing and her slurred complaints can be heard as she stumbles up the stairs.
‘I’ll be wanting my money back,’ she grumbles, or words to that effect. The rest of us just want our film back. And that’s what we get, although the first ten or 15 minutes have been ruined.
On the way out, I ask if this happens often, and two members of say that it doesn’t, not really.
As for the film, it’s worth seeing if you’re a Peaky fan. Non-fans will find little to win them round, and strictly speaking the film did not need to be made, but it is made well. The tone is elegiac, the pacing almost slow, interrupted by outbursts of violent rumpus. Cillian Murphy is an older, sadder Shelby, hiding away in his crumbling mansion, writing his memoir, called The Immortal Man.
The Second World War is in explosive flow, causing Shelby to be haunted by images of his time in underground tunnels in the first war. His unravelling mind is peopled by the ghosts of loved ones, another sort of hell.
In Birmingham, his estranged son Duke (Barry Keoghan), now boss of the Peaky Blinders, is terrorising the streets of Small Heath. A bloodied reunion beckons when Tommy leaves his mansion.
The music is occasionally very loud, as is the Peaky way, but a sublime moment near the end is sustained by Hunting the Wren, a wraithlike tune from Lankum and Grian Chatten.
There is a prominent role for Tim Roth as a sneering Nazi-sympathiser who plots to engineer a German victory (only Tommy can stop him, naturally). This took me back.
A few years before moving to York, I worked in south east London on a newspaper now long gone, like so many others. Roth had one of his first stage roles in a play at the Albany Empire in Deptford. I was there with my pen and notepad. I’ve been there, on and off, although far less than once, ever since.
The name of the play escaped me for a while, then it came back. It was Happy Lies by CP Taylor.
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man can be seen on Netflix from Friday, hopefully without any disruption from drunk people in your front room. Unless you have rowdy visitors.