
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.
Many of the people who see Bait will do so in similarly pampered surroundings, though its tour has taken it also to the sorts of communities, Cornish or otherwise, to which its characters’ predicaments most strongly pertain. But the subject of communities being overlooked, trampled or eradicated in the stampede for gentrification, second-homes, buy-to-rents and Airbnbs will be one of the pressing issues of any movie that seeks to engage with the current turbulence in our landscape.
In US cinema it has been investigated by Ira Sachs, first in Love Is Strange, his film about a middle-aged married gay couple who have to live separately when straitened economic circumstances force them out of their apartment, and more acutely in Little Men, in which an Argentinean dress-maker in Brooklyn is gradually squeezed out of her shop when her landlord dies and his family takes over the property. Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give also examined the place where liberalism collides with real estate, as a liberal Manhattanite played by Catherine Keener agonises over the poor (“I want to give something to someone,” she says vaguely) but can’t disguise her impatience for her elderly neighbour to die so that she can knock through into her apartment.
These movies give at least equal weight to the dilemmas of wealthy liberals but it is in a spate of films from the BFI, the distributor of Bait, that the presence of overlooked communities has most strongly been represented in recent cinema. In 2014, the BFI instigated diversity directives to establish a plurality of stories, perspectives and talent. The “three ticks” initiative, set up to “recognise and acknowledge the quality and value of difference”, asked a series of questions of all productions seeking funding, such as, “Is the project telling us something we do not already know?” and, “Does the project have the potential to open doors which have historically been closed?”
The directives were rolled out to other UK funding bodies (such as Ffilm Cymru Wales and Northern Ireland Screen) and the result has been a wave of films representing gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and geography in surprising ways. Among them were God’s Own Country, about a Yorkshire farmer who falls for a Romanian labourer, I Am Not a Witch by the Welsh-Zambian director Rungano Nyoni and Beast, a thriller set in Jersey, which has been virtually untouched by film or TV since the heyday of Bergerac.
It is Bait, though, which has inspired in audiences a uniquely visceral and protective response. Its resemblance to a neglected artefact lying for decades in a fisherman’s shed can’t have hurt. It looks like it has been lost for the longest time. Perhaps that’s why it speaks to us.
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SubscribeIt’s not just Holly. The entire British state does this. Every time I go back to England I’m always amazed and disheartened by the amount of scolding and proselytizing I see on TV and big billboards. It’s quite pervasive, but I wonder if the general public is either affected by it or just ignores it. A lot of it is overly sentimental and maudlin in a way that is peculiar to Britain.
Yep. It seems as if, ever since the “wrong” vote was made by so many (obviously uninformed) people, we have been bombarded with infantilising messages. Turbo-charged by the pandemic response (where to stand, which way to walk, how to wash your hands, how to sneeze safely, etc), the public is given no credit for being able to think, rationalise and respond. We are treated, as the author says, “as a passive vessel, a lump of clay moulded and shaped by everything that has happened to you”. Personally, I like to think I have a little more conscious control over my life.
Consider yourself fortunate that you apparently don’t have the BBC on your doorstep. Non-stop WokeWashing, anti-Brexit propaganda and decolonising agenda inserted into every possible subject area.
Yep. It seems as if, ever since the “wrong” vote was made by so many (obviously uninformed) people, we have been bombarded with infantilising messages. Turbo-charged by the pandemic response (where to stand, which way to walk, how to wash your hands, how to sneeze safely, etc), the public is given no credit for being able to think, rationalise and respond. We are treated, as the author says, “as a passive vessel, a lump of clay moulded and shaped by everything that has happened to you”. Personally, I like to think I have a little more conscious control over my life.
Consider yourself fortunate that you apparently don’t have the BBC on your doorstep. Non-stop WokeWashing, anti-Brexit propaganda and decolonising agenda inserted into every possible subject area.
It’s not just Holly. The entire British state does this. Every time I go back to England I’m always amazed and disheartened by the amount of scolding and proselytizing I see on TV and big billboards. It’s quite pervasive, but I wonder if the general public is either affected by it or just ignores it. A lot of it is overly sentimental and maudlin in a way that is peculiar to Britain.
I’ve actually had PTSD, having suddenly been left trapped and surrounded, out of the blue, by wreckage and dead people – I was the only one left alive.
It does put this sort of rubbish into its correct perspective (which is trivial and self-indulgent). But it can be slightly irritating to read. It also inclines me towards a somewhat acerbic response to these pathetic milquetoasts, I’m afraid.
I’m really sorry to hear about what happened to you and hope you are now fully recovered.
milquetoasts
Never heard of it and have looked it up. When we were sick as kids we got a thing called Goody – warm milk with torn up pieces of white bread and sugar. Yummy!
I’m really sorry to hear about what happened to you and hope you are now fully recovered.
milquetoasts
Never heard of it and have looked it up. When we were sick as kids we got a thing called Goody – warm milk with torn up pieces of white bread and sugar. Yummy!
I’ve actually had PTSD, having suddenly been left trapped and surrounded, out of the blue, by wreckage and dead people – I was the only one left alive.
It does put this sort of rubbish into its correct perspective (which is trivial and self-indulgent). But it can be slightly irritating to read. It also inclines me towards a somewhat acerbic response to these pathetic milquetoasts, I’m afraid.
She’s not trying to be your – or anyone else’s – therapist. She is pretending to care about stuff that nobody in their right mind would really bother about. And she’s doing that because the general public seem to like that sort of thing, and will therefore increase her company’s viewing figures. She acts as if she is hurt because viewers prefer emotion more than dispassionate analysis. She’s there because women want to see a woman of a certain age who brushes up nice, and men can develop a mild sexual fantasy around her. From what I can see of it (and that’s all from BBC and other outlets reporting from the sidelines) it’s nothing more than a big soap-opera story.
She’s not trying to be your – or anyone else’s – therapist. She is pretending to care about stuff that nobody in their right mind would really bother about. And she’s doing that because the general public seem to like that sort of thing, and will therefore increase her company’s viewing figures. She acts as if she is hurt because viewers prefer emotion more than dispassionate analysis. She’s there because women want to see a woman of a certain age who brushes up nice, and men can develop a mild sexual fantasy around her. From what I can see of it (and that’s all from BBC and other outlets reporting from the sidelines) it’s nothing more than a big soap-opera story.
I cannot read about this story. Headlines and questions and discussions for weeks. Can the UK please move on.
I know what you mean – the gut reaction is “frankly, who cares ?”.
But the article is really quite good. And hopefully enough to conclude reporting on this sideshow. But we all know it won’t be. Talking endlessly about stuff like this is so much easier than actually solving real problems. We might start talking about “displacement activity” – but then we’d be going full-on amateur therapy speak and lining ourselves up to replace Schofield on the sofa.
Exactly. In Shakespearean terms, “Much ado about Nothing”.
I know what you mean – the gut reaction is “frankly, who cares ?”.
But the article is really quite good. And hopefully enough to conclude reporting on this sideshow. But we all know it won’t be. Talking endlessly about stuff like this is so much easier than actually solving real problems. We might start talking about “displacement activity” – but then we’d be going full-on amateur therapy speak and lining ourselves up to replace Schofield on the sofa.
Exactly. In Shakespearean terms, “Much ado about Nothing”.
I cannot read about this story. Headlines and questions and discussions for weeks. Can the UK please move on.
Rather than “Why is Holly Willoughby trying to be my therapist?”, may I suggest the more pertinent question of “Why are you all still talking about Holly Willoughby?”
Watching this whole drama from the outside has been nothing short of bizarre. For days, this non-issue has been all over the news. As if there’s nothing else going on – like a war, inflation, a housing crisis, a collapsed health service…I’m guessing that the reporting is not a reflection of how the majority of people feel (I’m guessing most are as uninterested as I am), but it is very odd to watch.
(And, before you ask, I will not be needing counselling for PTSD due to this. I just would like news that contains actual NEWS.)
It’s another reveal of how we got into such ridiculous hysterics over covid. What everyone needs is a universal “ignore this story” button that simply removes it from your view permanently,
Think of the quiet you’d have enjoyed from 2020 not hearing about a certain low-threat, flu-adjacent bug that was knocking off a few olds; the joy of not hearing about the troubles of countries you can’t even identify on a map.
After a week you’d open a newspaper and see absolutely nothing on the page, which would end up saving you a few bob in subscriptions…
An “ignore this story” button would be great. I’d also love an “Accept/reject all cookies, FOREVER” button. Those banners annoy me so badly.
reject all non-essential cookies forever and get rid of the banners
for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ninja-cookie/jifeafcpcjjgnlcnkffmeegehmnmkefl
for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ninja-cookie/
You’re welcome.
Do these features also mean you have to log in every time to sites like Unherd?
I don’t.
I don’t.
Or use Brave browser which is, so I hear, the most secure and privacy focused browser.
https://brave.com/
Can it block all articles on Schofield and Willoughby?
They are actually working on something like that. Figuring out ‘is this an article on Schofield’ rather than something that just mentions the name Schofield (and possibly is about a completely different person, or the resting metabolic rate of human beings (the Schofield equation) or a brand of revolver) is something that could be done in the same way that spam has been detected. But I don’t know anything that is accomplishing this now.
They are actually working on something like that. Figuring out ‘is this an article on Schofield’ rather than something that just mentions the name Schofield (and possibly is about a completely different person, or the resting metabolic rate of human beings (the Schofield equation) or a brand of revolver) is something that could be done in the same way that spam has been detected. But I don’t know anything that is accomplishing this now.
But doesn’t deal with this automatically, (at least it didn’t last time I looked which was more than a year ago) unless you installed an addon. Brave works with most chrome addons, so the cookie-ninja addon should work — but I have not tested this.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/cookie%20ninja
Can it block all articles on Schofield and Willoughby?
But doesn’t deal with this automatically, (at least it didn’t last time I looked which was more than a year ago) unless you installed an addon. Brave works with most chrome addons, so the cookie-ninja addon should work — but I have not tested this.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/cookie%20ninja
Do these features also mean you have to log in every time to sites like Unherd?
Or use Brave browser which is, so I hear, the most secure and privacy focused browser.
https://brave.com/
reject all non-essential cookies forever and get rid of the banners
for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ninja-cookie/jifeafcpcjjgnlcnkffmeegehmnmkefl
for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ninja-cookie/
You’re welcome.
Knocking off a few olds?
You are not a nice person.
An “ignore this story” button would be great. I’d also love an “Accept/reject all cookies, FOREVER” button. Those banners annoy me so badly.
Knocking off a few olds?
You are not a nice person.
It’s another reveal of how we got into such ridiculous hysterics over covid. What everyone needs is a universal “ignore this story” button that simply removes it from your view permanently,
Think of the quiet you’d have enjoyed from 2020 not hearing about a certain low-threat, flu-adjacent bug that was knocking off a few olds; the joy of not hearing about the troubles of countries you can’t even identify on a map.
After a week you’d open a newspaper and see absolutely nothing on the page, which would end up saving you a few bob in subscriptions…
Rather than “Why is Holly Willoughby trying to be my therapist?”, may I suggest the more pertinent question of “Why are you all still talking about Holly Willoughby?”
Watching this whole drama from the outside has been nothing short of bizarre. For days, this non-issue has been all over the news. As if there’s nothing else going on – like a war, inflation, a housing crisis, a collapsed health service…I’m guessing that the reporting is not a reflection of how the majority of people feel (I’m guessing most are as uninterested as I am), but it is very odd to watch.
(And, before you ask, I will not be needing counselling for PTSD due to this. I just would like news that contains actual NEWS.)
Theodore Dalrymple has been writing along similar lines for years: “I am not responsible for my actions and so cannot be held accountable for them”. It has become a popular line of defence as it works.
“the knife went in”
“the knife went in”
Theodore Dalrymple has been writing along similar lines for years: “I am not responsible for my actions and so cannot be held accountable for them”. It has become a popular line of defence as it works.
What is actually the issue anyway? PS had apparently an affair with a consenting adult. Haven’t we got past that?
Actually a number of things, including the fact that the consenting adult was promoted within an organisation in which Philip Schofield had enormous power and influence which suggests at least the possibility of nepotism (and who would possibly have suspected that about the media ?). I’m fairly sure that an organisation of ITV’s size and ethical standards (at least the ones they claim to have) had guidelines and employment rules which were not followed.
A lot of the – entirely justified – schadenfreude here is due to the fact that these media organisations have been preaching to us for years about how we should be behaving and why we’ve all been doing it wrong all our lives. It’s the hypocrisy and double standards.
So it runs much wider than Schofield’s relationships.
Note also how all participants are currently claiming to be “victims”.
TBH I heard Phillip Schofield being interviewed last weekend and he sounded pretty devastated by the whole thing.
I am aware of workplace relationships elsewhere between staff members of very different seniority levels which have gone more or less unremarked.
TBH I heard Phillip Schofield being interviewed last weekend and he sounded pretty devastated by the whole thing.
I am aware of workplace relationships elsewhere between staff members of very different seniority levels which have gone more or less unremarked.
He had an affair with a ‘consenting adult’ if you believe that the fiftysomething Schofield did actually wait until the 18th birthday of the boy he’d known since he was 14/15, and got him his job at ITV. Arguably he was in a ‘trusted position’ over him.
Mainly, though, I think it’s to do with the brother being convicted of paedophilia, and then the long-kept secret about Schofield’s affair coming to light and prompting the settling of scores and vendettas.
Actually a number of things, including the fact that the consenting adult was promoted within an organisation in which Philip Schofield had enormous power and influence which suggests at least the possibility of nepotism (and who would possibly have suspected that about the media ?). I’m fairly sure that an organisation of ITV’s size and ethical standards (at least the ones they claim to have) had guidelines and employment rules which were not followed.
A lot of the – entirely justified – schadenfreude here is due to the fact that these media organisations have been preaching to us for years about how we should be behaving and why we’ve all been doing it wrong all our lives. It’s the hypocrisy and double standards.
So it runs much wider than Schofield’s relationships.
Note also how all participants are currently claiming to be “victims”.
He had an affair with a ‘consenting adult’ if you believe that the fiftysomething Schofield did actually wait until the 18th birthday of the boy he’d known since he was 14/15, and got him his job at ITV. Arguably he was in a ‘trusted position’ over him.
Mainly, though, I think it’s to do with the brother being convicted of paedophilia, and then the long-kept secret about Schofield’s affair coming to light and prompting the settling of scores and vendettas.
What is actually the issue anyway? PS had apparently an affair with a consenting adult. Haven’t we got past that?
Her and the other creature now binned , po faced, tedious, patronising, dull, central casting heome ceounties woke middle class from some Waitrose in Surrey: God help nu britn hew kay if this is what the ” ooh look at my new Tesla” social meountaineers aspire to being… They all need a night out in working man’s pub in The North to really put them in their place…
Her and the other creature now binned , po faced, tedious, patronising, dull, central casting heome ceounties woke middle class from some Waitrose in Surrey: God help nu britn hew kay if this is what the ” ooh look at my new Tesla” social meountaineers aspire to being… They all need a night out in working man’s pub in The North to really put them in their place…
Is that it then? Is that the storm in a tv tea cup done? Can we now return to things that really matter. Climate Ukraine. American China relationship. Energy resources. Housing. The NHS. Immigration. Inflation. education. unwoking woke etc PLEASE?
Is that it then? Is that the storm in a tv tea cup done? Can we now return to things that really matter. Climate Ukraine. American China relationship. Energy resources. Housing. The NHS. Immigration. Inflation. education. unwoking woke etc PLEASE?
But still we read, and then we comment.
But still we read, and then we comment.
I never watched This Morning, had only the vaguest idea what it was (I thought the ;presenters were married to each other, but I was thinking of another programme), and am, like some of the other commentators, utterly baffled by the amount of attention paid to these totally insignificant and uninteresting people. But do note it’s Phillip Schofield, not Philip!
I never watched This Morning, had only the vaguest idea what it was (I thought the ;presenters were married to each other, but I was thinking of another programme), and am, like some of the other commentators, utterly baffled by the amount of attention paid to these totally insignificant and uninteresting people. But do note it’s Phillip Schofield, not Philip!
Thanks Kristina.
Words of sanity.
I’m reasonably intelligent but I still don’t understand why the PS story has been ramped up so much.’ Man has affair at work’. OK. I suspect if he wasn’t gay it would be viewed rather differently, and this appalls me.
I don’t watch daytime TV and never will after this.
Ukrainians are suffering, migrants in boats and stranded in hell are suffering, Iranians and Afghans are suffering………a long list: just a start.
And HW sits there in white, prissy and self-obsessed, as if this is a major traumatising event. It really isn’t.
Thanks Kristina.
Words of sanity.
I’m reasonably intelligent but I still don’t understand why the PS story has been ramped up so much.’ Man has affair at work’. OK. I suspect if he wasn’t gay it would be viewed rather differently, and this appalls me.
I don’t watch daytime TV and never will after this.
Ukrainians are suffering, migrants in boats and stranded in hell are suffering, Iranians and Afghans are suffering………a long list: just a start.
And HW sits there in white, prissy and self-obsessed, as if this is a major traumatising event. It really isn’t.
Excellent!
Excellent!