The Go Betweeners
The beautiful Rosamund Pike is such a talented comedic British actress that somehow channelling Lady Elspeth Catton she even makes naming a gravestone font “Times New Roman” sound hilarious. If you’ve heard that the film Saltburn is Brideshead Revisited on a high, The Go Between on a low or The Shining somewhere in between, think again. Writer Director Emerald Fennell’s dazzling genius is to create her own genre of thriller-comedy-romance-drama-gorefest while breaking taboos you didn’t even know existed. And then to line up la crème de la crème of British acting (Rosamund, Carey Mulligan and co) and emerging Irish talent (Barrie Keoghan and Allison Oliver). Only Emerald could musically bookend to perfection a film using Handel’s Zadok the Priest and Sophie Ellis Bextor’s Murder on the Dancefloor – from majestic hauteur to killer moves.
Daughter of the jewellery and silverware designer Theo Fennell, she confides, “I love my name. I think it’s all the things perhaps that I am which is unironic, unsubtle and slightly over the top!” True to form, Saltburn is unironic, unsubtle and, begging to differ, wildly over the top. Emerald goes forth, “I don’t think irony is helpful because it’s a lie, it’s double talk. Things do not have to be all done in the same way. You can be earnest, you can earnestly love things, you can be unsubtle, you can be overwrought, you can be melodramatic and gothic, you can be all those things. In terms of dramatic narratives, you’re looking to find the thing that gets inside you in a way that’s truly sexy and disturbing.”
Saltburn’s a period film set mainly way back in ye olde days of 2007 when everybody smoked indoors and got wings downing Red Bull and eyebrow piercings were à la mode. The opening scenes are all about antics in an Oxford college before things really hot up at the voluminous country house of Saltburn. Emerald chose Drayton House next to the picturesque village of Lowick in Northamptonshire to be Saltburn. She wanted somewhere that wasn’t well known or on the tourist trail. Drayton House is all that and more – it never was and never will be open to the public. The cast and crew spent a full summer here; then the six metre high wrought iron gates were locked for good. Artistic integrity is secured by shooting every Saltburn scene at Drayton. This avoids the visual confusion of Julian Fellowes’ Gosford Park film flitting between the exterior of Luton Hoo (Bedfordshire), the reception rooms of Wrotham Park (Hertfordshire), the bedrooms of Syon House (London) and a film studio kitchen at Shepperton Studios, London.
“A lot of people get lost in Saltburn,” warns Duncan the butler. The characters get lost in the mansion, lost in the maze, lost in the madness, but never in translation. There are references within references in the dialogue. Saltburn heir Felix Catton (played by Australian Jacob Elordi who delivers another masterful triumph of capturing the upper class English accent), nonchalantly boasts, “Evelyn Waugh’s characters are based on my family actually. Yeah, he was completely obsessed with our house.” Turns out Brideshead was really based on Saltburn not Castle Howard in Yorkshire! His father Sir James Catton amusingly played by Richard E Grant organises a house party and listing names of the invitees complains, “Stopford Sackville has cried off.” The Stopford Sackvilles are the owners of Drayton House.
To say Saltburn is beautifully shot is to say a Gainsborough portrait is well lit or Grinling Gibbons knew a thing or two about framing. The symmetry of reflection is just one technique used to great effect, whether a candlelit dinner table or moonlit pond. Those Caravaggio like stills. Shooting on squarish four by three aspect ratio film captures the height of the architecture and interiors. The closeted cloistered class obsessed quad of the Oxford college followed by the country house courtyard emphasises the exclusivity of this upper echelon world. There’s symmetry in the writing too: Felix takes his guest Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan accelerating from mellow to moody to murderous) on an introductory whirlwind tour of the house starting in the great hall. At the end of the film Oliver will dance the same route sans vêtements in reverse, ending in the great hall. What could possibly go wrong in such gorgeous surroundings? The clue is in the script notes, “It’s all beautiful but it’s about to get messy, fast.”
Drayton House was the cover girl of the March / April 1987 edition of Traditional Interior Decoration, a seriously seminal well written fabulously photographed short lived much missed magazine. The cover money shot of the swirling staircase was accompanied by a 14 page spread salivating over the ravishing rooms. “The grey stone Elizabethan east wall of Drayton,” writes Michael Pick, “masks the baroque façade of 1702 covering a late 13th century great hall which forms the core of the house.” The medieval hammerbeam roof of the great hall is concealed by a 17th century baroque barrel vaulted ceiling designed by William Talman, architect of Chatsworth in Derbyshire. The writer concludes, “It has never been a setting for country house parties …” Rarely has an ellipsis worked so hard or been so ominous.
