by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Mars movie screening (http://marsmovieguide.com/) was devoted
to a couple of recent, independently made low-budget film with Mars-related
themes. The first was Seat 25, a British
production in which a billionaire capitalist, Macmillan (Daniel Brennan) — who
seems to have been drawn by writers Nicholas Agnew (who also directed) and
Madeleine Cooke as a combination of Richard Branson and Elon Musk — announces
that he has privately funded the first human-staffed mission to Mars and has
selected 12 men and 12 women for his one-way trip to colonize the Red Planet.
(The Agnew-Cooke script incorporates the recent discovery of water underground
on Mars and takes it a step further, positing water on the surface which could presumably be used to produce oxygen for
the settlers to breathe.) The 25th seat on the rocket he reserves
for the winner of a nationwide contest in which he asks people to write an
essay explaining why they want to go to Mars — sort of like an admission essay
to an elite college — and the winner turns out to be Faye Banks (Madeleine
Cooke), who’s been married for about a decade to a blond asshole named Jim
(Nicholas Banks). She has a sister named Pandora (Clare Fettarappa) who takes
wild trips around the world while Faye is stuck with her married life and her
boring husband. She’s a bit envious of her next-door neighbor Peter (Stephen
Lloyd) because, even though he’s as badly mismatched with his wife as she is
with her husband, at least he has a daughter and the two of them frequently
play together. Faye works for the local town council but funding cutbacks are
leading her to lay off a number of workers — including Teodor (Adnan Rashed),
an Eastern European immigrant and a widower who still owns the cello played by
his late wife even though he can’t play it himself. She sees him and he’s
packing for what he says is a trip to his family, but the next time she goes to
his home the police have sealed it with crime-scene tape and a testy woman
police investigator (Amy Newton) asks her about their friendship and then tells
him the old man had no family. He committed suicide and when he told Faye he
was going to be “with his family” he meant he was going to join his wife in
death. There’s also a subplot with Faye’s father, who married a much younger
woman after breaking up with Faye’s mom and who wants to retire and live on the
Continent, while Faye’s stepmom wants to stay in Sussex.
For most of its
running time Seat 25 is what the
Brits used to call a “kitchen-sink drama” in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s,
including the intimations of a potential affair between Faye and her neighbor
(who seems a much better match for her, physically and psychologically, than her actual husband). But when
Faye turns out to be the contest winner of Seat 25 it essentially becomes Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory meets Close
Encounters of the Third Kind (albeit with
the genders of the latter reversed — through much of this film I was
remembering the rather snide comment made about Close Encounters when it was new: “If I were married to Teri Garr I’d get on a flying saucer
just to get away from her!”). Jim’s first reaction to the news that his wife is
leaving him literally to go to
Mars is disgust and anger — he even comes close to hitting her but draws back
at the last minute — but then there’s a tender scene between them in which he’s
obviously trying to win her back by showing her the first bit of concern he’s
exhibited all movie. Seat 25 is a
neat little film, though the only hint of space travel we see is a final shot
of Faye in a spacesuit and a stock shot of a rocket blasting off with her in
it, and it’s an intriguing combination of domestic drama and science fiction
even though Mars is really just a symbol of all the old dreams Faye once had
for her life that got lost in the boring swamp of suburban routine. It’s also
hauntingly acted — once again, class, the British seem to produce the best
actors in the world: a British cast doesn’t heave and strain through their
parts, doesn’t show off their star charisma or make it all look difficult. They
just become their characters and
through the subtle force of their impersonations make you believe they are the
people they’re playing.
