Bait is an eerie and deeply strange film. Director Mark Jenkin uses editing, sound design and cinematography to maximum effect to baffle, unsettle and build tension to boiling point. This is not the kind of arthouse film that leaves viewers scratching their heads as to what it means, but leaves a deep emotional impression.
The story concerns a Cornish fishing village which now relies on tourism for it’s main source of income. This is a story about community, or rather, the erosion of community by market forces and the relentless march of time. The main character, Martin Ward, has been reduced to a fisherman without a boat, a sad contradiction which does not go unnoticed by the other residents of the town. But when a friend points this out to Martin, that he cannot really be a fisherman because of his lack of a boat, he corrects them: “not yet”.
Martin’s family home has been sold and transformed into holiday accommodation; his brother uses the family boat to take tourists on trips around the bay. Yet still he doggedly clings to his traditional livelihood and relies on leaving nets on the beach to catch fish and lobsters.
Much of Bait’s strangeness comes from Jenkin’s use of 16mm stock, which gives everything a grainy, ghostly quality. Familiar objects like plates, fish heads and pints of beer, held in closeup, seem like artefacts from another world. If you’ve heard anything about this film, it’s probably something to the effect that it is a Cornish culture clash, if the story was told by F. W. Murnau. I suspect that if we were treated to the bright sunshine Cornwall often experiences in August, the film would lose some of it’s menacing edge. It feels like a bad dream, but not a well remembered one.
Jenkins painstakingly edited the film by hand and the effects here are as striking as the monochrome cinematography. There are often half second pauses between lines of dialogue, giving the characters’ conversations a jarring, standoffish quality. Characters are rarely shown talking to each other in the same shot: the camera cuts frequently between Martin and the Leigh family who have bought his old home. The two sides, the local and the metropolitan, are utterly alienated from each other.
“You didn’t have to sell us this house.”
“Didn’t we?”
Choices are forced, desperate measures are taken and people cling to what they believe to be rightly theirs.
The tension rises as Martin stubbornly continues to leave his van in a spot reserved for tourists. Edward Rowe gives Martin a steely-eyed determination, but not without humour. He acerbically comments on the “nautical” feel that Sandra and Tim Leigh have given to his former home, which is now decorated with fishing nets and a porthole. The old way of life has been chewed up and spat out as tourist chic.
There are moments of comedy like this throughout the film, as characters undercut the tension with remarks like “How’s she gonna suck his dick with that plum stuck in her mouth?” The wit of the locals is contrasted against oafish tourists, complaining that surely it must be illegal to start a noisy boat early in the morning (even the mother of the Leigh family, Sandra, recognises the unchanging nature of the tides). Cornish slang, rarely heard on film, is lovingly presented here as another thing that separates the locals from newcomers. Speeches about being considerate to the community are dismissed, because who’s community is it, anyway?
Sandra is sympathetic to Martin, suggesting that the conflict can be resolved. But her daughter has fallen for Martin’s handsome young nephew, Neil, to the ire of Sandra’s stuck up son. The editing contrasting these relationships becomes frantic, with rapid cutting between Sandra and Tin preparing a lobster and Neil cooking pasta with his new girlfriend. At several points during the film there are cut aways to scenes of police outside a house and to a boys heading falling limp on the pier, just like the fish caught by Martin. At first it is not clear whether these are echoes of earlier conflict, or portents of what is yet to come, but the underlying threat of violence grows stronger and stronger. However, when it comes the climax is not what we have been led to expect will happen. The film wrong foots us just when we think we have pieced together the puzzle, in this world where ghosts, both literal and metaphorical, are seen in every corner.
All the sound in the film was added in post-production, contributing to the eerie, dream-like atmosphere. Martin’s boots crunch all around us and fish heads slap onto the pier. A small soundbite of Radio 4 heard in the Leigh’s home hints at Brexit and the debates around controlling the British fishing industry. Yet the conflicts depicted here began longer ago than the 2016 Referendum and will continue long after. This is a richly constructed story about losing one’s place in the world and deserves to be seen as one of the most original films of the decade.
Mark It Zero 