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Carol Morley’s self-portrait of the artist as a young woman is rich, tender and terribly funny and sad: a study in the chaos of being young and a triptych of childhood, girlhood and youth, with some daring touches of Terence Davies. It is about the ordeal of having to invent and reinvent your own teenage sense of self, even as the things you thought permanent suddenly collapse – including the background stability of your poor old mum and dad. And it’s also about the untold, unacknowledged story of sadness that lay behind the angry blaze of punk and new wave. Watching this I thought of something I’d assumed lost for ever: my own feelings, aged 17, on hearing Buzzcocks’ Sixteen: “… I wish I was 16 again / Then things would be such fun / All the things I’d do would be the same / But they’re much more fun / Than when you’re 21.” Could it be, I thought, that I’m already sad about not being 16?
7 Miles Out is based on Morley’s autobiographical novel of the same title, the once-upon-a-time-in-Stockport story of Ann, played with charm and zing by Lucy Halliday, and as a sweetly innocent young girl by Amelie Hughes. Young Ann pretends to be making a radio programme with her cassette recorder the way so many did in the 1970s, and hero-worships her would-be rock journalist elder brother Scott (Kasper Hilton-Hille) – based on Morley’s brother Paul – who is already plugged into the burgeoning post-punk and new wave scene.
Ann’s mum Bryn, wonderfully played by Gemma Whelan, is capable and good-humoured in a no-nonsense sort of way, but later to be beset with anger and mercurial depression. She has however found something to smile about now in the news that her husband and Ann’s dad Ronald, played by Aidan Gillen, has found a prestigious new job in Manchester – seven miles out. So to get to work, he has apparently been supplied with a handsome, though not brand-new car.
Ronald exudes a dangerous and almost radioactive aura of angry discontent that Gillen knows how to project. Sitting on his armchair, smoking and watching TV still dressed in suit and slightly loosened tie, Gillen’s Ronald plays along with Ann’s artless requests for a radio interview on the subject of his exciting new professional future. He is capable of romantic gestures and gentleness, which perhaps baffle and unnerve his family. What exactly has got into him? What has he decided upon?
Ronald’s terrible fate is to govern the rest of Ann’s life, even as she gets bullied and then thrown out of school (a place as brutally uncaring as anything in Kes); she later has to live in a grisly boarding house that her mum hates. Ann tries to start a band with her best mate Hel (Leila Entwistle) – perhaps more than best mate – in imitation of her heroes, Joy Division. She yearns for the musical scene in Manchester, to escape her pain, to cauterise the agony of what happened to her dad, and nullify her own wretchedness in never being able to tell anyone. There are three people who take their own lives in this movie, but the only one without a shame-filled cover-up is Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division.
Ann’s attempts to get tickets to see Joy Division, and then to see Joy Division without tickets, are gripping in themselves and bring us to that figure who somehow looms inevitably large in any representation of this subject: TV presenter, Factory Records owner and co-founder of the Haçienda club, Tony Wilson (played here by Jim English); he is one of the many supercilious individuals who let Ann down and won’t let her and her mates in to see the band. Later when Ann descends into depression and drinking, she ringingly denounces the pompous Wilson: “I’ve shagged him; he gave me my first croissant!” It’s a line so surreal that it has to be taken from life.
And so Ann gets further and further into the music scene, closer and closer to a reckoning with her own pain – but then mysteriously goes away from it, or through it or past it. Is it something she has dealt with or simply found a way of burying? There is a tricky encounter with a London music promoter, played in cameo by Claire Grogan; Ann can’t forgive her for something she says about Curtis. This poignant, smart film is such a pleasure.
English (US) ·