Stephen Giddings as self in Stephen (2023)
There are several films here, nested together like Matryoshka dolls. There is the silent, black-and-white film that our eponymous protagonist (Stephen Giddings) watches in the film’s opening moments, framed by the glare of the projector beam. Titled Arrest of Goudie (1901), this film was shot by the Edwardian film-making duo Mitchell and Kenyon on the streets of Liverpool and follows a bank employee called Thomas Goudie who embezzles money to pay for his gambling debts. Commonly understood as the first film to reconstruct a true crime, Arrest of Goudie was shown only three days after Goudie was arrested by police.
Then there’s the film we are watching, a feature debut by the London-based, German visual artist Melanie Manchot, starring members of a Liverpudlian recovery group alongside professional actors. And then there’s the film-within-the-film, for which Giddings auditions to play Goudie in a role that mirrors his own experiences in addiction and recovery.
Unfortunately, Stephen bears several predictable traits of another sort of film: the commissioned artist’s film. It’s there in the on-the-nose treatment of social issues, the overuse of archival footage from the host city, the scenes of (admittedly well-performed) interpretative dance and the stiff dramatic reconstruction of past events. Stephen was originally commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial, where it showed in the format of a multi-channel installation, and later premiered at Sheffield DocFest as a single-channel narrative feature. I haven’t seen the original installation, but I suspect these ideas work better in a format where you are not tied to watching something from beginning to end.
Gidding’s central performance is excellent; you can see why Manchot wanted to work with him again a decade after her video installation Twelve. He manages to be at once both tough, vulnerable, and commanding. This much cannot be said for some of the other performers. Though often attractively shot, scenes tend to drag and the tone veers unevenly (intentionally, no doubt) between hard-boiled crime drama, stark social realism, and amateur dramatics.
At one level, it feels unfair to critique a project whose intentions seem so well-meaning, not least through how it connects with groups doing genuinely transformative community work, from the Addiction Recovery Services to the dance group Fallen Angels. The central message – that addiction is a perennial part of our society whose trauma can be processed, and maybe even healed, through creativity and not demonisation – is an important one. But great social work does not always a good film make.
► Stephen is in select UK cinemas now.