One of the most extreme and successful examples of the ‘new directors’ film. A surrealistic burlesque which in its exuberant insanity seems like a radical version of the early Jane Campion.A completely anti-social family lives in a block of flats on the Isle of Dogs in a gloomy fantasy variation on East London. Mother has cracked, grandmother plays banjo incessantly, the son is permanently in an acid-house trance, a hallucinating girlfriend and a pyromaniac daughter seem to complete the madhouse, but the father beats everything. He is unemployed and sees that the end of the world is nigh. To prepare for the coming deluge, he starts building a real Noah’s ark in his living room.
The film comprises a stream of symbolic, experimental images. On the soundtrack, Sylvia Plath is reading her Lady Lazarus. This makes the film more literary…
