Back in 1999, Todd Solondz won a BIFA for his highly controversial film ‘Happiness’. Now he revisits the film’s characters in his new film ‘Life During Wartime’.
Named as one of The Most Dangerous Films Ever Made, Todd Solondz’s 1998 film ‘Happiness’ astonished and sickened in equal measure with its themes of sexual abuse, suicide and depression in middle-class suburban American. Despite the bleak subject matter, Solondz’s mercilessly black humour provided a satire somehow as sickly hilarious as it was utterly discomforting.
Now the characters from that first film are back in ‘Life During Wartime’. Except they’re played by different people and they all seem to have aged and progressed at a different pace. As accessible as the end result is, it’s an odd concept – it’s not quite a sequel yet not something new either.
“It’s kind of a quasi sequel. It’s part variation and part sequel involving characters from not only ‘Happiness’ and ‘Welcome To The Dollhouse’ but also new characters that haven’t appeared in anything I have done,” explains the writer/director. “It’s some sort of combination, so if you are strictly looking for a sequel then I’m not sure it qualifies. The tone and aim is very different from what characterized ‘Happiness’. Someone said it’s something like a ‘post-traumatic stress syndrome movie’.”
Solondz’s resolutely confrontational body of work is as consistently dark (2004’s ‘Palindromes’, for example, is even more challenging than ‘Happiness’) as such a description would suggest. But the question of what attracts him to such visceral material doesn’t seem to trouble him at all.
“Well, the strange thing about the writing process is that you imagine what you want to write about. But I think your subject chooses you and I don’t know why I write what I write in some sense, it’s all a process of discovery,” is his explanation. “The movies are in some oblique way comedies, but sometimes very acid and sad and even mournful and sorrowful.”
As if to prove the concept of being discovered by his subject, Solondz explains that he wrote ‘Life During Wartime’’s first scene and was subsequently inspired by an unexpected desire to further explore the pre-existing themes that were created in his earlier films.
“I just wrote it and I wondered where would I go from here, or should I go on from here and it made me ponder what I was even thinking about and what was sympathetic and what was human,” he says. The crux of his thinking revolved around the issue of the character Bill, revealed in ‘Happiness’ to be a paedophile who preyed on his son’s friends. In ‘Life During Wartime’, Bill is released from prison and eager to somehow make amends with one of his victims.
“I cannot view him sympathetically because how could anyone sympathize with anyone who rapes children?” he continues. “But what makes him so difficult and compelling is that in spite of his monstrous deeds we know there is a human pulse feeding there. That’s what moves me.”
‘Life During Wartime’ is a little lighter than what preceded it. Despite the return of Bill (veteran actor Ciarán Hinds is cast in place of the original’s Dylan Baker), the characters as a whole are a lot more sympathetic – a trait emphasised by Shirley Henderson’s central performance as Joy, in which she maintains the haunted expression of someone who could see the worst potential in the nicest surprise.
As for the title?
“Well it’s not the first time that a title of my movie is the song that a character performs in the course of the film, which is also the case with ‘Happiness’ and ‘Welcome To The Dollhouse’. Of course it is very much of its time – the world at war – the movie in some extent obliquely references that, and metaphorically I suppose the ways in which we are at war with each other and ourselves.”
Words by Ben Hopkins
Life During Wartime is in cinemas and Sky Box Office from April 23rd.
