DVD REVIEW

GYPO
[Force Entertainment]

This intelligent, well-crafted and understated British drama is a masterful addition to the Dogme school of film-making, a movement founded in Copenhagen in 1995 and dedicated to creating a ‘pure’ cinema, as opposed to the Hollywood-style cinema of empty spectacle that dominates theatres world-wide. Dogme directors swear to uphold a ‘Vow of Chastity’, whose rules include shooting only on location, hand-held camera-work, no soundtracks save for where such music occurs naturally on location, and an avoidance of superficial action such as murders and gunfights. The movement’s best-known directors include Lars von Trier and Harmony Korine, while its films include Lone Scherfig's Italian For Beginners and The Idiots.

Jan Dunn’s Gypo (a pejorative British term originally used to belittle Gipsies, now also employed to describe refugees in the U.K.) is Britain’s first Dogme film. It screened earlier this year at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival to great acclaim, and has won awards at the Frameline San Francisco Film Festival, and the British Independent Film Festival.

Starring Pauline McLynn, Paul McGann, Rula Lenska and Chloë Sirene, Gypo tells the story of a struggling working class British working class family living in Margate, England, but does so from three very different points of view. A triptych of tales comprises the central drama, each segment seen through the eyes of one of the three main characters: Helen (McLynn), an unhappy housewife who feels increasingly confined by her loveless marriage; Paul (McGann), her racist, blue-collar husband; and Tasha (Sirene) a school-friend of Helen’s daughter, who lives in a caravan park with her elderly mother (Lenska). Tasha is a refugee from Eastern Europe, and her arrival slowly brings to the surface all the tensions in Paul and Helen’s marriage, while the threatening presence of her own husband threatens to destroy the tentative relationship that is blooming between the two women before it can truly begin.

The beauty of this simple, stark and gritty film lies in the way that each of its segments presents a subtly different depiction of the unfolding story. Helen, seen through her own eyes, is patient and put upon, whereas in Paul’s central segment of the film, she is depicted as shrewish and nagging. While some may find the film’s naturalistic pace slow, its actors are universally strong, their characters well-rounded, and the drama, although it stretches credibility as the film moves towards its climax, is realistically presented.

Like the cinema of Ken Loach, the largely improvised Gypo presents an all-too-believable portrait of the lives of everyday people told with conviction and restraint. The digital transfer is crisp, with the film shown in full-screen aspect. A navigable chapter menu is the DVD’s only extras.

RICHARD WATTS