A drowned deckchair floats in a scum of lifeless algae and weed on the lake in St James’s Park. Youthful males punting on the river Cam, with King’s College Chapel basking in the sunshine, redolent of a planet of continuity, whose fractures are invisible. It could be a scene a century previous. Nightlife on the avenue in central London, on the edge of Soho and theatreland, noticed from over. Possibly this final is a watch from a smeary window in John Le Carré’s fictional household of the intelligence service on Cambridge Circus. Who is looking out?
Home windows and shadows, buildings we can not enter and rooms whose goal we can only guess at. Shadowy paths, a bosky dell hidden from prying eyes, the edge of a cornfield just after harvest. We flip from place to place, pursuing rumours and bedevilled by uncertainties.
Ungentle is a sort of psychogeographical tour of a spy’s England, mapping the collisions and intersections of at the very least two secret worlds. As writer and artist (and someday contributor to the Guardian) Huw Lemmey writes in his Utopian Drivel web site, “the talent-established of homosexuals and spies in mid 20th-century Britain had a substantial degree of overlap”. Lemmey’s Ungentle explores the territory, equally bodily and psychological, via the voice of a lone off-display screen protagonist, an unnamed double agent performed by Ben Whishaw. He recounts his intertwined sexual and political awakenings, and what led him into his lifestyle of intrigue, when the camera roams the places of his trysts and betrayals. Whoever this person is, the fabric of his globe is real plenty of, as are his fellow mystery agents, apart from 1, a different Cambridge university student and foreseeable future spy, and also the narrator’s lover, named Edwin.
Pretty much very little comes about in in this formidably loaded nonetheless deceptively basic and wonderfully shot 16mm film, filmed and edited by artist Onyeka Igwe. There are blind windows and ducks on the water, state estates and swanky lodges, buses passing, taxis loitering, males meandering toward covert assignations in the park, cows in the subject and properties in the sunlight, roses blooming in their beds, a fountain in the courtyard, a summer-residence overlooking the Solent.
All prosaic more than enough, other than for the voice: the narrator is a male whose moral compass wavers and misleads at each individual switch, in Whishaw’s lulling, evenly cadenced, exactly enunciated voice. There’s a certain prissiness there, and what we are being advised is both heartfelt and self-serving. Careless in confession, Lemmey’s narrator qualified prospects us from publish-very first globe war youth, fucking with a labourer in a subject at harvest-time, to Cambridge, and his membership of the Apostles and his seduction into his key lives as double-agent and queer. Is the narrator a fifth, a sixth or even seventh Cambridge Comintern agent, along with the Cambridge 5 and their associates, Blunt and Philby, Burgess and Maclean, Cairncross and Liddell?
It is a story of collisions and spirals, the worlds of intelligence officers and double agents, and an unlawful homosexual entire world that hid in plain sight. Collisions also of course and empire, architecture and heritage, academia and politics. Ungentle maps assignation points and affinities and codes of recognition, and routines of intrigue and dissimulation.
Loaded with idealism and want, strategies and self-justifications, indiscretions and unmaskings, Ungentle requires us to the Purple Home in Cambridge, “a tiny pink-brick Kremlin by the Cam”, and to St Ermin’s Lodge in Mayfair, in which the Distinctive Operations Executive was started, and in which Philby and Maclean met their Russian handlers, to 54 Broadway, the place the Top secret Intelligence Provider experienced its offices, to St James’s Park, wherever spies would meet and queers would cruise, and to the seashore dwelling on the Beaulieu estate in Hampshire, wherever the young Lord Montagu was arrested subsequent a law enforcement raid, just before obtaining a calendar year-long prison sentence in 1954 for keeping a gay party there.
The narration is only interrupted by George Butterworth’s placing of Is My Crew Ploughing from AE Housman’s 1896 selection A Shropshire Lad, sung by Bryn Terfel. Butterworth was killed by a sniper’s bullet on the Somme in 1916, while Housman’s poem worries youth and enjoy and reduction, and death in the cause of empire. Housman was homosexual, and the tunes here is significantly from simply incidental. There are echoes and allusions in all places in Ungentle. The only other interruption is the muted seem of a cell door clanging shut as the narrator talks of his confession. For all the bucolic views and the scenes from the city there is no birdsong, no site visitors, no shouts from the late-night time West Close revellers spied from the window on Cambridge Circus, no footsteps resounding on the Tin and Stone Bridge in St James’s Park, exactly where new recruits ended up welcomed into the solution service, correct in the middle of the a historic cruising ground.
What we have as an alternative is consummately visual: a gradual digital camera pan, a lens homing in (on a window, a rose), or speeding and leaping as it scans pavements and pedestrians, as if wanting for a tail or a get in touch with. The camera delves into shadows and cornices, corners and paths into the woods, and scans the landscaped courtyard of Dolphin Sq., property of numerous MPs and lords and users of the magic formula environment, both equally true and fictional. The digicam gets to be practically paranoid in its glances, trying to find either a deal with or a way out. I watch Ungentle as if seeking for clues and warn for misdirections, seduced by the camera and by Whishaw’s voice. At the finish of Ungentle the digicam settles on two Isle of Wight ferries as they merge and part in the sunlit haze, plying in reverse instructions, crossing sides, and back again again.