Jonathan Glazer is one of the UK’s most unique cinematic voices. His work is better-known than his name; from the music video for Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit’, to 2000 Ray Winstone classic Sexy Beast. He is a director whose confidence and technique deepen with every release. His sense of poetry and attention to sound impart a singular lyricism to his work—as though each film is a tapestry of its own soundscape. Allegedly planned for next year is an adaptation of Martin Amis’ The Zone of Interest. Glazer has been busy in the interim, directing last year’s stellar short The Fall, and now Strasbourg 1518.
Strasbourg 1518 doesn’t sound like much on paper—contemporary dancers juxtapose the COVID-19 lockdown with a sixteenth century “dancing plague”—but the film is elevated by the touch of Glazer and long-time musical collaborator Mica Levi. The pair first collaborated on 2013’s Under the Skin, to memorable effect. The most successful moments of the film were when, tugged by Levi’s score, it plunged from hidden-camera vérité into bizarre surrealism and horror. Strasbourg 1518 sustains the same surrealism and horror for its fifteen minute duration.
Besides its title, Strasbourg 1518 contains no direct reference to the dancing plague. Instead we witness similarities between our world and the ‘upside down’ society of the mid-millennium. Now, as then, our population fears an impending apocalypse; we, too, feel powerless to stop it, our every move in service of greedy landlords and a corrupt and sexually-deviant ruling caste. There is a strange comfort in sharing afflictions with such distant ancestors—and a depressing absurdity.
Performers move in loops of varying styles; straining and slapping at the walls, framing the home as a prison, and rendering daily routines like washing surreal through repetition. Strasbourg responds to confinement more than anything else. It's interesting to note this is a response from those too self-searching and artistic to default to press-ups and crunches. Much of this work feels retaliatory; the cubic rigidity of a bedroom a taunt, dancers’ free-flowing movements their retort. The dance on show here, paradoxically, doesn’t feel performative. It instead looks like the painful act of wrangling with one’s own demons, excising panic, and reckoning with a denial of freedom.
Mica Levi’s score pounds with frustration, and is closer in tone to her early work as Micachu than her relatively more austere film scores. It’s a piece which feels both kinetic and stagnant—like the dancers of Strasbourg it goes nowhere, but does so with a huge amount of violent energy. It mirrors the mania leaking from performers, and punctuates each of their loops like a typewriter’s carriage return, noisily signalling the end of a line of text.
If nothing else, Strasbourg 1518 shows the BBC do still have an ounce of courage knocking about somewhere. No doubt this film will attract ire; many will disapprove of their license fee funding something they see as self-aggrandising luvvie junk. But fifteen minutes of contemporary dance per year inadequately represents the vivacious and renowned UK dance scene. Perhaps detractors should question why they find Strasbourg any harder to stomach than Strictly Come Dancing, when the latter elects exclusive representation of a style rarely seen outside Butlins. The UK is a vibrant, colourful country that houses thousands of talented artists. Public service broadcasting has a responsibility to show this. That Strasbourg is such an outlier in the network’s programming is rather sad. Conversely, that it’s such an oasis allows its waters shine even bluer.
Strasbourg 1518 is available until the 20th of August on BBC iPlayer. For those Stateside (or cheeky VPN users), the film is being hosted for free by A24.
Words: Andrew O’Keefe