At Dawning
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A comic morality tale: A woman fleeing in the half-light from a one-night stand encounters a suicidal man in bizarre circumstances.
She thinks that if she can steal away in the darkness, before the man in the bed wakes up, then last night never happened. The man in the tree strongly disagrees.
“AT DAWNING” a short film by Martin Jones, won the GOLDEN BEAR at the BERLIN INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL 2002 – a popular choice with Berlin audiences, who watched it with Francois Ozon’s “8 Femmes” It has also the won Best Photography prize at the Capalbio Short film Festival (Italy), and was runner-up in the Curzon Soho short Film prize.
AT DAWNING stars JENNY AGUTTER as a woman escaping from a one night stand who encounters a suicidal YVAN ATTAL (director of “Ma Femme Est Une Actrice) in bizarre circumstances. A touching comedy fusing ethical debate and screwball action, which reaches a topsy-turvy climax as dawn breaks over London.
“It's a film about an infantile wish - to escape the consequences of your actions, and how that wish can collide with the practicalities of life, such as other people's desires, the force of gravity and babies..." Martin Jones
| Director:
Martin Jones (their other films)
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| Producer: Adrian Hughes |
Genre: Narrative |
| Country: United Kingdom |
Copyright Year: 2002 |
| Original Format: 35mm |
Color Type: Color |
| Sound Type: |
Length: 00:12:00 |
| Original Language: English |
Subtitle Language: None |
Other Info:
AT DAWNING was written by London-based commercials director Martin Jones, to launch a career in fiction films. He wanted to show what he could do with a subject a little longer than thirty seconds. His experience making commercials influenced the film, not with flashy camera angles, but through an attitude to an economy of storytelling. Consequently the script packed a huge amount of incident and characterization into 12 minutes, leaving some audience members feeling like they’d seen a much longer film.
Initially conceived as a visual comedy following the frustrations of a woman trying and failing to leave the scene of a regretted one-night stand, the script quickly developed into a deeper, more emotional take on fidelity and morality. Once the central incident of the suicidal man becoming caught in the tree outside the building was in place, the central dialogue scene in the film began to take over.
“Once the characters started talking, I couldn’t seem to stop them until the film had taken a totally unexpected course, and they had taken on a life of their own way beyond what I originally conceived”.
This growth of ambition for the film continued into the casting. With the naivity of the outsider in the film industry, Martin started at the top of the list of his favourite screen actors, and approached Jenny Agutter, and the French actor/director Yvan Attal.
Jenny is known internationally for Walkabout, Logan’s Run, and especially An American Werewolf in London, but in England, to most people she will always be remembered fondly as Roberta in The Railway Children. She seized upon the moral ambiguity of the character in At Dawning as a hilarious antidote to her spotlessly pure image, but perhaps because of the place Jenny has in the audiences hearts, they never judge her character in At Dawning and root for her sometimes dubious struggle to erase her infidelity right from the start .
Since seeing Attal’s bravura performance in Eric Rochant’s “Autobus” Martin was convinced that he was one of the few screen actors who could carry off the role of the man arrested in mid-suicide – taking an extreme and absurd situation, and making it seem utterly convincing. Encouraged by rumours of Attals’ Quixotic and mercurial choice of roles, he dispatched the script to France and was ‘knocked over’ to receive a positive reply. Perhaps Attal was interested in the thematic links with his own directorial debut “Ma Femme est Une Actrice”, but his commitment to the script put the film on a whole new footing. Throughout rehearsal, Agutter and Attal supported the writer director completely. “They showed me what I suspected, that the film could work equally well as an all-out comedy, or on a darker, more emotional level.” Choosing the path of switching between these two moods from one moment to the next was the most difficult, but the most rewarding approach.
Director of photography Mary Farbrother (The Darkest Light), who had worked frequently with Martin on commercials, came up with a solution to one of the film’s many technical challenges; how to evoke the atmosphere of pre-dawn in a four-day shoot in one location with constantly changing light. The ingenious use of little-used day-for-night and color-shift polarizing filters went some of the way to creating the effect, but visitors to the Notting Hill location were surprised to see huge swathes of violet gauze bought from a Brick Lane Market fabric stall draped across the trees. Despite this blatant artifice, audiences seem utterly convinced that the filming took place at dawn. Director Martin Jones notes that luckily very few people get up that early and so don’t realise that real dawn is usually a grey and depressing affair – quite unlike the subtly romantic tones which Farbrother conjured.
The most daunting physical challenge was to portray the fall and suspension of the suicidal man into the tree. This required a huge scaffolding rigging from the roof of the house to suspend Attal two stories up, with his feet dangling over some nasty-looking London railings – an awkward position in which to embark on light comic dialogue, especially as darkness loomed on the short October days. The director couldn’t resist donning the harness and costume for some overhead shots, leading to a lively on-set exchange of views with Attal, in which the Frenchman suggested that Jones stick to directing and leave the acting to him. The indignities heaped upon Attal concluded with the final scenes of the film, as Attal was suspended upside-down, going redder and redder in the face while the camera jammed and his taxi to the London /Paris rail link waited.
Martin Jones has taken every possible public opportunity to apologise to Attal for the physical affronts and pain he suffered during the shoot (how many people would stand for being slapped in the face after hanging upside-down all morning?). Jones has tried to convince him that it was all worthwhile in the name of art, but lives in trepidation of further meetings, and fully expects a slap in the face himself from either Attal, or his partner Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Not to be outdone in the dangerous stunt stakes, Jenny Agutter showed off her tomboy roots by clambering up the side of the house with frightening alacrity – attempting to evade the safety-man’s harness with cries of “heavens I don’t need one of those! I used to climb trees twice this size in Kuala Lumpur …besides it will ruin the line of the dress!” All this much to the delight of a crowd gathered on the Notting Hill street, who were favoured with an angle on their heroine which they had never dreamed, and who responded to the conclusion of each take with a round of applause.
“It's a film about an infantile wish – the wish to escape the consequences of your actions, and how that wish can collide with the practicalities of life, such as other people's desires, the force of gravity and babies..." Martin Jones
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Principal Cast:
Jenny Agutter, Yvan Attal, David Buonoguidi,Christine Entwisle, Alice Murray |
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