The trippy movie Jonathan Glazer calls an “absolute head-fuck”
With truly stunning cinematography, emotionally peculiar narratives and meticulous attention to detail, Jonathan Glazer has been considered one of the best British contemporary film directors ever since the arrival of his debut feature, 2000’s Sexy Beast, starring Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley.
Following up with 2004’s Birth, the mesmerising 2013 science fiction thriller Under the Skin starring Scarlett Johansson, and his disturbing Holocaust tale The Zone of Interest, Glazer has delivered stultifying works of cinema that explore some of the darkest facets of the human experience.
As any filmmaker ought, Glazer possesses a deep understanding of his medium and its history. In an interview with Esquire, he was once asked about the movies he saw when he was younger, where he realised that cinema was more than just storytelling. This led to him discussing the 1973 British comedy-drama fantasy O Lucky Man.
“There are 100 others that are as relevant, but I’ll use this because it’s a good example: a film called O Lucky Man, a trippy film,” Glazer said. “For instance, there’s an image in that where the character played by Malcolm McDowell, he goes into a church, and it’s the Harvest Festival.”
“He’s eating all the food because he hasn’t eaten for days,” the director continued. “And this woman comes along who works in the church. She goes, ‘My son, you mustn’t, you shouldn’t take the food from God, you really mustn’t’. She then says: ‘Here’. And she pulls her breast out of her jumper! And he suckles on her breast. And this is a fully grown man and a fully grown woman. It was the strangest thing I think I had probably ever seen at that point.”
O Lucky Man was directed by Lindsay Anderson and saw Malcolm McDowell, best known for his performance as Alex DeLarge in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, reprised his role as Mick Travis, whom he had previously played as a disaffected schoolboy in Anderson’s 1968 work If.
Anderson delivers a satirical exploration of capitalism and class struggle in O Lucky Man, charting Mick’s journey as he aspires to succeed through a series of absurd employment scenarios, selling coffee and becoming a medical test subject, always with an optimistic outlook.
“There’s another scene where there’s a man’s head, you saw him under a sheet,” Glazer also noted. “And the whole sheet is vibrating like a man with a fever. And Malcolm McDowell pulls the sheet off to see the rest of the body, and it’s like a pig with a man’s head because they’re doing some weird experiments in this laboratory. Just the shock of things like that. Just the absolute head-fuck, you know?”.
