20 years on from the Cannes walkouts, a new look at The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael

“Eeurgh, that was horrible!” says a schoolgirl during a class on cinematic presentations of World War II, complaining about Come and See (1985), Elem Klimov’s notoriously confronting story of Belarusian Holocaust. “Well maybe it was horrible,” responds her teacher Stuart Reeves (Stuart Laing), “but war is horrible.” 

This exchange, coming near the beginning of Thomas Clay’s debut feature The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (2005), also neatly reflects the film’s initial reception. For its climactic orgy of violence caused walkouts at its Cannes premiere, and early criticism was similarly tepid, focusing on what were perceived as Clay’s adolescent shock tactics. Writing for the Daily Telegraph, Sukhdev Sandhu condemned the film as “a total sham”, while Karina Longworth wrote in Cinematical: “Loaded with easy cynicism and even easier sadism, it’s a beautifully orchestrated ideological disaster that shoots for social commentary but settles for lowest-blow shock.”

Yet the film is about adolescence. Middle-class and musically skilled, yet also awkward, withdrawn and taciturn, young Robert Carmichael (Daniel Spencer) will undergo teen rites of passage over the course of the film, crossing over to Newhaven’s more delinquent community (which he is expressly warned to avoid), taking his first ecstasy pill (before moving on to other hard drugs) and having his first sexual encounter. 

There is, beneath Robert’s other, more obvious talent and promise, the potential for something darker and more dangerous – bestial urges in conflict with his more civilised trappings. Early in the film, a schoolgirl who notices him eyeing her and her friend comments, in words that will turn out to be more than mere hyperbole, “My god, he’s such a rapist.” Later we will see Robert furtively masturbating to, of all texts, the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom – and, while working on a film class project, Robert will lash out in a disproportionate rage against a fellow pupil, beating him to and then on the ground. 

That same evening, after playing lead cello in a school concert, this quiet boy will join his friends Joe (Ryan Winsley) and Ben (Charles Mnene) on a nocturnal adventure, soon erupting into a rampage of horrific violence from which all three will walk away laughing as if it were nothing.

When the earlier fight broke out, Robert and his classmates had been shooting a WWII film of their own among the historic cannons of the Newhaven Fort. Yet even as these pupils re-enact (and come to blows over) a war in which British participation was unequivocally just, a very different international engagement forms the backdrop of the film, as television news is full of more questionable justifications for the Second Gulf War. Indeed, in one extraordinarily chilling sequence, as a drugged-up Robert sits in a living room while several of his new associates can be heard – but not seen – gang-raping a young girl in the next room, Bush and Blair are visible on the TV announcing their decision to invade Iraq. It is as though these two kinds of forced entry, one abroad and one at home, are playing out in parallel, so that it is hard to be sure where metaphor ends and reality begins in this allegory of war and its mediated representation.

The aloof, almost Hanekean manner in which the sequence is shot only adds to its upsetting impact: for DP Yorgos Arvanitis’s camera circles the room at a distance, while keeping the young woman’s audible ordeal out of sight, and so leaves the unspeakable to the viewer’s imagination.

The film’s final outrage, in which Robert becomes an active participant, is rather more graphic in nature, even if its most horrific act is occluded by sudden cutaways to file footage of the D-Day landings and of Winston Churchill making the peace sign. This “home invasion”, as Joe expressly calls it, executed upon a celebrity chef (Michael Howe) and his American wife (Miranda Wilson) recently moved to Newhaven, begins as pillage but ends in rape, torture and murder. As Robert, Joe and Ben vent all their pent-up resentment, anger and frustration in the most viciously thuggish way, they are also ecstatically reimagining their country’s vengeful incursions into the Middle East.

If the climax of Clay’s film elicits an “eeurgh” from some of its audience, then it is self-consciously modelled on one of cinema’s most infamously provocative, shocking scenes. For in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), the teenager Alex (Malcolm McDowell) – a lover, like Robert, of classical music – and his gang invade a modernist, bourgeois home (called “Home”) and rape the woman inside in front of her beaten husband. Similarly preoccupied with infectious, imitable violence, whether at a domestic or national level, Clay is staging the muddled manner in which contemporary geopolitics map onto the British homeland. For, here, Joe and Ben call a migrant boy “Osama” as they bully him; powerful marijuana is advertised as coming “straight from Afghanistan”; and more than one coalition of the willing enacts atrocity. One might object to the gratuitousness (whatever that means) of this war film’s ending, but war, even if only shown in its oblique ramifications, is horrible.

If anything, Clay’s Thailand-set follow-up Soi Cowboy (2008) was an even more alienating and difficult film, full of jarring asymmetries and patience-stretching longueurs – and it would be over a decade before the provocateur could get another feature off the ground. This was the period film Fanny Lye Deliver’d (2019), which uses the English civil war much as The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael uses WWII and the Iraq War: to dramatise conflicts of a social and sexual nature within us all.

The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael comes to BFI Player on 21 May.