The Fighter’s Ballad has won the fight. It has resisted five figure paychecks and survived years in Fringe theatre to become what it is now: independent film as you will not have experienced it. A Yellow Dolphin Films and Vertigoheights Film endeavour, Toby Sebastien Ukpo’s feature proudly opened the 9th annual London Independent Film Festival.
The setting is humble – the cavernous interior of a Shoreditch church – the film anything but. The Fighter’s Ballad is the charged emotional and philosophical interaction between two very disparate souls: a priest and a hoodlum who breaks into this sanctuary with a black eye and a heart full of rage.
A rollercoaster of ideas, memories and feelings ensues as we see the world through the vision of this Angry Young Man and the Man of God who tries to abate him.
Clive Russell has been cast superbly as the Priest – Scottish, longhaired and bearded, from bedraggled origins – and gives a powerful performance, albeit the more contained one when measured against Cadwell’s Angry Young Man. The latter performs with unrivalled passion that also reflects the fervour of his screenplay. He has written the Young Man’s dialogue in rhyme and verse, the Priest remaining in “prose” – a technique used abundantly in Shakespeare, among others, to delineate characters.
Russell’s Priest was the more engaging and developed personality. The Young Man is slightly unfathomable and one doesn’t end up liking him, his anger and boisterousness becoming tiresome. But these angry young men do exist. And The Fighter’s Ballad wasn’t necessarily written to give us our quota of Hero.
Ukpo’s direction is understated, letting the feelings and characters speak out for themselves, and breaks up the action effectively with Samuel Karl Bohn’s moving score and the sad and mysterious pasts of the two men.
As a devotee of Dostoevsky I was very much at home. Cadwell’s work explores religion, man’s existence and how the two ebb and flow around each other. He has bravely taken on and tackled a huge body of thought which really makes this film stand out in style and content from what one is used to seeing on our stages and screens. It won’t be for everyone.
LIFF runs until 23rd April.
