One of the depressing things about going to the gym, other than it being boring and painful, is the exposure it brings to the world of TV. Obviously it is worse in the daytime than at night, and no doubt worse after the morning news programmes have finished and the stuff that follows has begun: re-runs of lower league Spanish soccer, pyjama cricket, Loose Women, antiques shows, soaps, aggressive rappers, singing strippers, then, as lunchtime approaches, news-lite. Physical exercise is supposed to be morally uplifting - mens sana and all that. It leaves me feeling somewhat defiled.
I was reminded of this, vaguely, when watching Chris Morris's Four Lions the other night. Omar, a young would-be terrorist, rants at his co-conspirators - "We have instructions to bring havoc to this bullshit, consumerist, godless, paki-bashing, Gordon Ramsay, Taste the Difference Speciality Cheddar, torture-endorsing, massacre-sponsoring, look-at-me-dancing-pissed-with-me-Knob-out, Sky One Uncovered, who gives a fuck about dead Afghanis Disneyland!" I sort of know how he feels.
I loved Four Lions. It is, apparently, a particularly difficult aspect of the novelist's art to combine in the same narrative elements of comedy and tragedy without perceptible change of tone. The greats can manage it - Dostoevsky, Anthony Powell, Waugh - but others struggle. Graham Greene said he spent hours reading Dickens to try and work out how it was done. In this film Morris makes it look easy.
There are obvious bits of knockabout - the scene where Omar fires an RPG the wrong way round in an attempt to destroy a US drone is pure Laurel and Hardy - and some terrific verbal invention in a real or imaginary British Pakistani patois; but while I sat there hoping things weren't going to work out as badly as I feared they might, the terrible denouement seemed properly to belong to the events leading up to it; even the funny ones.
More than this though, Morris has put together a satire in which pretty much everyone gets a kicking. The terrorists are stupid and callous. Special Branch close in on them but end up arresting the wrong man. Police marksmen shoot someone dressed as the honey monster and argue whether the honey monster is a bear or not. Omar's brother, a Muslim cleric who tells him what he is planning is wrong, nevertheless locks his wife in her room. There is a scene in which Omar and his wife tenderly discuss the suicide bomb plot, played painfully straight; I was thinking how acidic was Morris's attack when it occurred to me that things like this must have actually happened, and he was making us watch them.
The best British film I've seen in ages. It makes The King's Speech look bland and unambitious. As Omar's dim sidekick might Waj might have said, proper good art.
