Odd this day
The Lady in the Van, adapted from Alan Bennett’s biographical (and slightly autobiographical) play started filming.
Bennett famously keeps a diary, highlights of which appear in the London Review of Books each year. Some of his entries for the filming made their way into the Guardian to coincide with the film’s release a year or so later. A lot of it, which seems appropriate, given the subject matter, concerns dirt and mess.
He opens with the characteristically slightly mournful observation:
As always on a film I feel a bit lost, the writer not having a proper function and seldom being called upon.
…but soon proves useful. Five days later, for example:
11 October
Come away around 4.30, weary rather than exhausted as I’ve contributed very little, my only suggestion being that Alex Jennings, who is eating an egg sandwich, should drop some of the egg down his pullover, as I invariably do. The costume department seize on this as a piece of cinéma vérité and egg is accordingly smeared down his front. It hardly seems a day’s work.
The production uses
several vans in varying stages of distress
…so
for the purposes of filming the contents of one van have to be taken out and installed in its successor. I sit in my chair on the pavement watching this wearisome process at work and marvelling at the dedication and conscientiousness of Katie Money and the props department who have it to do. Miss S’s belongings consist of mountains of old clothes, carrier bags stuffed with her papers interspersed with the contents of her larder, half-eaten tins of baked beans, packets of stale sliced bread, loose onions (which she ate raw), rotting apples and wilting celery and dressed over all with half-used toilet rolls, dirty dusters and soiled Kleenex that one didn’t like to look at too closely.
It would be entirely possible to mock up this distasteful agglomeration with some underlying bean bags and a top‑dressing of eye-catching refuse. The camera wouldn’t know. But the actors would. So all this detritus is repeatedly and meticulously transferred from van to van as if it were the contents of an 18th-century salon. I know this devotion to duty has nothing to do with me personally but I would like to shake all their hands — the boy who carefully transfers the opened can of congealed tomato soup, Katie, who delicately repositions the dog-eared pack of incontinence pads and puts one of them to dry, as Miss Shepherd did, over the electric ring. I am in all their debt. Instead, one of them breaks off to see if she can fetch me a cup of tea.
According to Eloise Millar and Sam Jordison’s Literary London (2016), however, all this hard work was undone during the hours of darkness when no one was looking. In chapter five, Diarists and Lexicographers, they recount that:
One night it was ‘used’ by a passing couple. The next morning it had to be deep-cleaned — and then filthied up again to create the right look for Miss Shepherd’s home.
It’s a trivial thing, really, but I’ve always rather liked that little detail for pointing up the artifice involved in making something seem real to us.
There’s another example in another work of Bennett’s. A Private Function (also starring Maggie Smith), as you probably know, concerns contraband pork in WWII. Several outlandish things happen in the course of the film, but one story about smuggled pigs didn’t, as Bennett recalls in the introduction to the published screenplay:
I know of one village that was regularly visited by a hearse, the visits seemingly unrelated to the death rate. Stopped one day by a Ministry of Food inspector it was found to be carrying a coffin packed with pork … an incident far too theatrical to be put in the film, life as so often more over the top than anything one could invent. But ask anybody in the village today about pigs in that period and they still look over their shoulder before replying.
One could, I imagine, as well as volumes of diaries, elicit from writers many such stories which they wish they could use but can’t — some for legal reasons, of course, but some artistic.
Real life just doesn’t have the right shape.
