A Fox In The Night

"No discounts for loyal customers?" It's one of many details that caught me, that belie that this is, somehow, Keeran Anwar Blessi's début as writer, director. I've seen interview that makes clear some dialogue was devised, improvised on the day, and while I have often said that accident is the secret magic of film, creating space and time for the unexpected is in and of itself a skill. To shelter that spark is the work of many hands.

It is a treat. I use magic advisedly. Herne Hill is more of a gateway to Norwood than Narnia. Within that realism though, there is opportunity for the mysterious. Samira Oberberg's camera is always in motion, always on the edge of unease, restlessness. It is a close thing, proximity, intimacy. I can only look with my eyes, and even then not without assistance, but I've enough experience with ways of seeing that I can see when the way is different.

Like that titular fox, it's the wild in the urban, the animal in the alleyway, adaptability and adversity. Another life in the interstices of lives. Blessie's performance is supported by that of Matthew Faucher as Theo. There are others but this is a two-hander that one imagines could be staged with nobody but these two and the way that they chance around and away from each other.

Keen observation abounds.

That camera, whose quality had me scouring notebooks to see if I had seen Oberberg's work before. Location does some of the lifting, I can find the exact place but that's the exterior, the inside does the work for me. Isabel-Olsini Edwards' production design might not seem more than bottles and floors but all of them tell a story as heavy with implication as mention of rugby or kerbs.

The tone, a work without score, the closest to music the chime of phone using a mostly-fictional taxi App that shares its name with a Swedish secondhand equestrian marketplace. The shifting of codes, of registers, of voices, of faces, set and slope of shoulder, the way doors are opened. Phones are ubiquitous and seamless here, it's the ear that prompts it all, central. Grit around which further beauty accretes.

These men. "Man never sees foxes." "I see them all the time, that's what's so special about London." The two, Korey, Lewis. Not the only forms of masculinity, there's semi-tailored and name-dropping and the dishabille of the City, the signifiers of schools that have unmussed ties and mufti. There are so many layers here that I am dazzled, the junction might be A215/A2199 but the intersections are labyrinthine.

Circumstance has awarded me a better than fair share of privileges and so I'm not in a position to judge accuracy, but I can still sense honesty, awkwardness. A Fox In The Night is full of them, one of the few films in the last year or so that I have taken the time to watch twice, thrice. It reminded me of Too Rough, also in award contention, also a delight. There are times when I will see things that others won't, nor care about. It doesn't matter that foxes are so common in that neck of the woods (or absence thereof) that they've given their name to the nearest Wetherspoons. That's a detail that makes me smile, to know how little it matters.

The essence of the Romantic, capital R, lower-case daffodils, is the moment of beauty recalled, and it abounds. Though the title could draw from Vermeer and not vermin it's that recollection, that lightness, that focus that makes A Fox In The Night so strong.