Figgis: Stormy Monday (1988)

Stormy Monday may have been Mike Figgis’ debut feature, but it’s as fully-formed and self-assured as the work of an auteur operating at the height of his career. While Tommy Lee Jones and Sting are top billed as an American property developer and a Newcastle nightclub owner, the film really belongs to Melanie Griffith and Sean Bean, who play a cleaner and call girl caught up in their crossfire during the Toon's kitschy annual "America Festival." However, even their tremulous performances are more or less subsumed into what essentially plays as an extended mood piece, a study in Newcastle noir. Every shot is meticulously composed and caressed by a silky sinuosity of neon jazz, a sea of liquid light that only occasionally gelatinises into anything resembling realism. Like the visual counterpart to an immaculately produced album, everything feels perfect, a little too perfect, as if images have somehow reached their apex or limit, transcending all but the coolest, strangest film bleu. Perhaps that’s why Figgis also chooses to shoot Newcastle at its most incommensurate, frequently setting the labyrinthine, medieval Quayside against the industrial sweep of the Tyne bridge, as if to evoke a city that only exists in deep focus, or a city torn between two perceptual scales. What little narrative does intrude revolves around the Quayside’s imminent redevelopment, and so this also feels like a city on the very eve of gentrification, a city that is about to turn its insatiable appetite for appropriation back upon its own streets and harbours, poised to consume itself with all the doomy romanticism that Figgis would bring to Las Vegas a decade later. And the film doesn't represent that moment so much as participate in it – in Figgis’ hands, it simply is the perceptual threshold around which Newcastle gathers in all its exquisite ephemerality, caught between advertising and elegising its imminent reconstruction, remediation and redundancy.