The Wordsmith's Forge

Afterward I felt that I should have recognized Brian Fairbairn and Karl Eccleston's Tommies (2022) at once as the work of the same filmmakers who introduced half the internet to Polari with Putting on the Dish (2015), not least because the two short films make such a nice double feature for the viewer who shares their abiding interest in historical diction, coded communications, and the infectious paranoia of the pre-decriminalization queer male UK. Dense for their snapshot runtimes, they require a similar willingness from their audience to entertain the past on its own terms and learn how to listen to it, whether it's a bombshell of intricate argot or an event horizon of the politely unspeakable.

Six pyrotechnic minutes on Hampstead Heath in 1962, Putting on the Dish is the wittier, higher-wire of the two, sustaining even through its hard zag of an ending a rapid-fire exposition of Polari to scream for. On top of a crash course in the range and variety of marginalized influences that cascaded into one voraciously colorful anti-language, it concisely demonstrates how two strangers side by side on a public park bench could have anatomized the exuberantly unexpurgated adventures of acquaintances or exchanged their own appraisals of well-packaged passers-by, openly under the radar of Lily Law. "Real fantabulosa bit of hard." Its barbed ciphers form a fragile safe space, advanced as casually as a noncommittal naff or bona and then more colloquially relaxed into with talk of floweries and dinarly and disappointingly dolly HPs. "Nada to vada in the larder?" – "Oh, bijou." Nothing else automatically links the bolder and cagier persons of Steve Wickenden and Neil Chinneck—the invaluable screenplay gives their camp names as Maureen and Roberta—but in their shared appreciation of a zinger of defiant backchat, the hillside seems tranquil with possibility, at least until recalled to the realities that oblige a furtive countercultural jargon in the first place. Polari defaults so naturally to irony, getting a heart-punch out of it is an achievement, one of the few direct gestures in a vignette that rewards cryptography. Even the book in its pink jacket encodes its own implications. What English signals is nothing to say.

Down to the riddle of its title, Tommies is the more somberly ambitious slow burn, circling its fifteen minutes in the wings of the haut ton in 1814 around an invented yet all too imaginable coda to the infamous treatment of the Vere Street Coterie. An exercise in negative space, it never looks inside the molly house itself, shows nothing of the men who patronized it except through their social radioactivity, the cishet fascination with their queer customs. "When the police raided their den, they found a dozen men in a bed in one room and in the other a midwife helping a female grenadier give birth to a Wiltshire loaf!" Its Mayfair house is a curdled chocolate box, thick with the stifling half-light of a summer's evening and frantic with the trills and flutters of canaries like the tight catch in a throat or the snap of an expertly wielded fan. Sarah Winter as Georgina Ashton has a look of Psyche not only because of the white fillet her bronze-dark hair is caught up with, but because she stands on the black-and-white chequers of the stair hall as if facing into hell. How she fits into the loose, allusive swirl of gossip that gradually overtakes the women's conversation may be clocked first by students of the queer Regency, but it still has to be deciphered from the ellipses left between the more overt shocks as the cross-currents of schadenfreude, sympathy, and self-preservation gather to a point of no return. As with so much paranoid cinema, even at pocket-size, the question of who knows what is really asking the use of which the knowledge will be made. "When a man holds fire to his chest, it is not only his own clothes he burns." It's a tense, trickily layered tour-de-force for its all-female ensemble—the rest of its cameos are precisely razored in by Marion Bailey, Claudia Jolly, Elizabeth Roberts, and Susie Trayling—and it doesn't not land the wraparound of its final scenes to the unsettled Gainsborough of its cold open, but it feels like more of a fragment than its predecessor despite or because of its greater craft. Its apophatic technique might have to let up for a feature. As a chip of history, it can still haunt.

Beyond their adroit ear and eye for period detail, both films are attractive little objects. Shot on open-air digital by Benjamin Barber, Putting on the Dish has a sort of Eastmancolor overcast that suits both the year and the season; its men look unglamorous and attainable, the imperfections of their faces as expressive as the artifice of their language. Tommies looks like a heritage ghost on slightly powdery 16 mm, a gallery of revealingly shadowed portraits hung by DP Brian Fawcett; its women emerge from their era with all the mixed and inconvenient reality of facts escaping the historical record. I can best compliment the characterfully inhabited costume design by Oliver Cronk by invoking Alexandra Byrne. Impressively, neither feels like just another whack of gay tragedy even when they focus so intimately on the never-beneficial ramifications of a criminalized life; they are too vivid and compassionate, interested in all of their players regardless of their effects. I watched them courtesy of their writer-director-editors' YouTube and would be intrigued by any further foreign countries—how differently and how recognizably things are done there—they choose to add to their many-voiced queer mosaic. This English brought to you by my bona backers at Patreon.