In Camera (2023)
- Reviewed from the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
On the set of a TV show somewhere in London, cameras are rolling. A good-looking young actor (Aston McAuley) plays a greenhorn detective standing over the bloodied body of a dead man. He looks a little queasy and is told to toughen up by his more experienced superior. The director calls “cut!”. Immediately, the young actor shrugs off his character’s humility and strides off set to take a call from his manager where he complains about the show, and all the juicier opportunities his multi-series contract is keeping him from taking. It’s a clever opening to Naqqash Khalid’s showbiz satire debut, complete with a mispronounced reference to the director himself as “the Asian guy” shopping a hot new project round town, but it’s about to get cleverer still. The star of In Camera is not the petulant white guy, but the brown-skinned ‘corpse’ lying in a pool of fake blood.
Meet Aden (surely a breakout Nabhaan Rizwan). Aden is also an actor, but far from delivering ultimatums to his manager, he’s just trying to book a gig. His handsome face comes slowly into focus in a mirror, as he thanks the rising star, who looks right through him. Then he’s shooed off the set by a production assistant in a headset, in a manner that leaves neither us nor him under any illusions as to his place in the pecking order.
A series of unsuccessful auditions are drolly outlined in Khalid’s sharp, skewering screenplay, all their bright, hard edges showing in DP Tasha Back’s shellacked images. “Would you like to try an accent?” one casting agent helpfully suggests as Aden, not for the first time we gather, goes out for the part of a generic Middle-Eastern terrorist. She doesn’t specify which accent, just one that’s “not from here.” Other times, Aden, usually referred to by call-time number, is harangued into making his teeth whiter on cue, or simply shunted into a room of similarly non-white hopefuls, standing elbow to elbow. They mutter mutinously amongst themselves about the one guy among them who gets cast all the time, and against whom they have no hope of landing a part – a precisely aimed swipe at an industry that tends to accord stardom to a maximum of one British-Asian actor at a time.
Aden lives with Bo (Rory Fleck Byrne) an Irish junior doctor so strung out on endless shifts that he has started to hallucinate, seeing hospital vending machines in the strangest of places. His tiredness also manifests in a kind of distraction as regards Aden, with whom he’s friendly while seldom bothering to meet his eye. But then they get a third roommate, and Aden meets smooth-talking, self-promoting fashion consultant Conrad (a terrific Amir El-Masry) who arrives sporting immaculate tailoring, ordering lavish sushi deliveries and enthusing about how, for minority Britons like him and Aden, it is “our time”.
Inspired in part by his interactions with Conrad and in part by a disastrous episode in which he tries to aid in the therapeutic process by acting as a surrogate son for a grieving couple, Aden starts to realise that his talents – for he is evidently a very talented actor – could also be applied to everyday life. What if he approached the idea of success as, itself, a role?
With so many witty, knotty ideas about ethnic dis/advantage at play, there is some extraneous noise in Khalid’s exuberant, take-no-prisoner’s first feature. Certainly, the subplot about Bo’s exhaustion is surplus to requirements, especially given there’s perhaps a suggestion of Bo’s deeper connection to the surrogate plotline that didn’t end up making the final cut.
As it occurs now, in an apparent attempt to make a broader, generational statement about professional pressures among young British men, Khalid risks a both-sidesism that gently excuses and softens Bo’s unconscious racism. In Camera is at its best when, like in that early shot, it is slowly pulling focus from the inequities and idiocies of the entertainment establishment to Aden himself. He’s the watchful observer of these unfairnesses, but also their victim and eventually, in an inevitable but satisfying homage to OG showbusiness satire All About Eve (1950), their compromised conqueror.
And while many of the performances around him are sharpened to a cutting point, Rizwan remains extraordinarily subtle as Aden, which is especially remarkable, given the span of his dramatic arc. It’s such a finely honed performance that we can’t see the joins, we don’t notice the moment when Aden crosses the line from sympathetic, put-upon striver to something more closely resembling sociopathy. But then again, there is no line – that’s the point of the jagged, erratic but frequently inspired In Camera, a debut as fully ambitious and as dubiously moral as its hero: when you know the game is rigged, playing dirty is the only way to win.