Poldark aside, Cornwall has not been the scene of many modern screen hits. The new British film Bait has changed that. There was always going to be an element of commercial risk in releasing this crackly, zero-budget film about Cornish fishermen, shot on black-and-white stock on a vintage clockwork camera and processed entirely by hand. Launching it at the fag-end of summer, when cinemas are still dominated by blockbusters, seemed unlikely to improve its prospects. What possible tag-line could reel in the masses? “If you liked Aquaman…”?
But Bait has become a surprise hit; it will be rippling out to more venues across Britain until the end of the year. As a fisherman without a boat, the gruff but drily funny Martin (Edward Rowe) is facing an existential crisis. He long ago sold the family cottage to a middle-class couple who now hawk it out as an Airbnb, the fridge ready-filled with fizz and local cheese. But he grumbles about how these London toffs have decorated the place with nautical paraphernalia (“All bloody ropes and chains — looks like a sex dungeon”) and has no time for their claims to be re-energising the community: “You pay slave wages then piss off to the Maldives,” he fumes. So whose Cornwall is it anyway?
The writer-director Mark Jenkin, a Newlyn native, has spent 20 years, on and off, bringing the film to fruition. The idea, he says, can be traced back to 1999 when “the whole world came to Cornwall” to see the solar eclipse. That prospective version of Bait involved a civil war between the locals and the incomers, while a later draft concerned a fisherman making a video to preserve his way of life to show it to his unborn child. What has remained in the finished Bait, two decades on, are the germs of both ideas: class tensions, neglected and struggling communities exploited by tourism, and the sense of a way of life fading from view forever.
Chief among its accomplishments is bringing the community itself into focus. “There’s a tradition — and it’s not just in Cornwall, it’s in a lot of the regions — where you use a specific location as a backdrop for somebody else’s story,” Jenkins says. “And it’s usually a story where somebody arrives who’s troubled, and they don’t realise they’re troubled, but through interactions with ‘simple folk’ they simplify their life. I wanted to bring the Cornish people to the foreground rather than being in the background and being a short-cut for simplicity or stupidity.”
Perhaps it’s for the best that it took so long for Bait to reach the screen. The film’s observations about the characters and their landscape have a baked-in depth and richness. Jenkin invites us to notice the self-sabotaging hauteur of Martin, and the way that his battles over territory are reproduced on every level — in a miniature war about parking spaces, or in a dispute about the pool table at the local pub. Brexit is mentioned only in a brief radio debate overheard in passing but it isn’t a stretch to say that the film has absorbed many of the tensions that led Cornwall to vote overwhelmingly to leave the EU. In Martin’s feelings of abandonment, alienation and resentment, Bait gives some idea of how such a situation could have come to pass.
Depending on the circumstances of each screening, it is likely that Bait will turn the subject of privilege, entitlement and ownership back onto the viewer. I happened to watch it at an independent cinema in a shabby-chic corner of east London that has been only marginally resistant to gentrification itself. After watching this story of a man battling pretentious Londoners for control of his livelihood, I crossed the road to a former greasy spoon that has undergone a hipster makeover. In the same cramped booths where labourers once sat elbow-to-elbow over their full English, I thought about Martin and his desperate bid for livelihood while I nibbled on tenderstem broccoli with fennel, capers and yogurt, and waited for a dirty vegan burger.
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