Breaking Baz: Riz Ahmed & Lily James Play Delicious Cat-And-Mouse Games In David Mackenzie’s Whistleblower Thriller ‘Relay’ – Toronto Film Festival
David Mackenzie is full of deceit. His movies, not him.
Mackenzie can lure you with the cunningness of an illicit couple, played by Tilda Swnton and Ewan McGregor, in his 2003 drama Young Adam. “Give us a come-hither look,” I remember him instructing Swinton on a barge berthed on the Forth and Clyde Canal in Scotland.
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Treachery of a different kind is afoot in his latest film Relay, which had its world premiere Sunday at TIFF.
The chicanery is there. There’s no sex, but there’s seduction.
The audience is being seduced too; we’re being lulled. You’ve been warned.
The two protagonists are played by Riz Ahmed and Lily James, at the top of their game. And what delectable games they play.
Beige is the color of conformity. James is first seen wearing a suit in that tone because she doesn’t want to stand out. She’s a scientist working in biotechnology and was part of a team that developed a strain of insect-resistant wheat. However, food safety experts have deemed the wavin’ wheat unsafe because they’ve discovered side effects that can harm those who chomp it down. It’s being flogged to countries in Africa, and the feeling is they don’t matter.
But the people of Africa matter to James’ Sarah, who’s stepping up to blow the whistle about the nefarious goings-on.
Sarah’s going to need protection because some corporate goons led by Sam Worthington are out to stop her dumping on the wheat that’s headed to Africa.
Ash (Ahmed) is her man. He’s a cautious man; let’s go up a notch and call him paranoid.
Anyone conversant with those 1970s classics of paranoia The Parallax View, The Conversion or Three Days of the Condor soon will get the lay of the land. Tom uses a phone service to relay messages between his clients. The service acts as a sort of safety buffer as well.
He’s canny, our Ash, as he leads Worthington and his flunkies, played by Willa Fitzgerald and Aaron Roman Weiner, in a merry cat-and-mouse dance.
It’s Hitchcock mixed with, well, pure Mackenzie cinematic deceit.
The filmmaker caught sight of Justin Piasecki’s script pre-Covid, and it stuck with him. He spent three years “fiddling with it a lot,” he says.
“We sort of pulled it together to make last year, and I was drawn to the world of the whistleblower and the slight politics of it without it being political,” he tells us. “And the notion of those people that do kind of go out on a limb to blow the whistle and the personal cost it has.”
The idea of the story, he says, was to find something that “sympathizes” with whistleblowers “but in a sort of very thriller-ish way.”
Once he had his cast, Mackenzie spent time working with them. I like how he’s taken strands of Ahmed’s past work, particularly the actor’s use of sign language from his Oscar-nominated turn in Sound of Metal, where Ahmed played a metal drummer experiencing hearing loss. “I always evolve stuff with my cast, and Riz is a fantastic actor to work with and very creative and very compelling on screen,” Mackenzie says.
Ahmed’s character doesn’t say very much for the first 25 minutes of the film ”So you’re having to inhabit the space of him and his combination of paranoia and vulnerability, which is, I think, part of the tension that drives you through the film.
“He’s living life on the edge and choosing a kind of lonely espionage-like existence,” he explains.
Mackenzie says he was thrilled to work with James too. “She’s got a quality where she’s becoming much more womanly and interesting. And I think the scientist’s story that she has is a really interesting thing for her to play,” he says admiringly.
I ask what he means by saying that James is much more womanly.
“I mean, she’s obviously played a lot of young women, and romantic roles and all, but she seems to have entered another phase now, in a way. And I think there’s something really interesting; she’s playing out a slightly more mature character,” he adds.
Yes, indeed. What does it mean when we see James’ Sarah standing at night in her fourth-floor apartment, in the window, backlit, draped in black silk lingerie?
Mackenzie laughs and says that Sarah is staring out into the night and that she’s ”in a goldfish bowl and she knows it.”
She’s being watched for more reasons than one.
There’s obviously more to the story than I’m giving away here, and I sincerely hope that Sunday’s audience at TIFF keep shtum about the plot!
“Yes, don’t give anything away. Keep the secrets,” Mackenzie pleads.
He really likes the “cat-and-mouse-type genre.” And, he says, “you’ve got some quite compelling bad guys and you’re rooting for one person, then you’re not sure whether you’re rooting for them. … It’s fun.”
Mackenzie and his stars conversed with former and existing whistleblowers and with former and existing spies “to inform Riz and Lily about the tradecraft elements and the kind of personal toll these things have on people.
“I’m always trying to get some authenticity into the vibe,” he says. “So there were a lot of very important conversations with people who often are quite lonely and sad and regretful. In the case of Tom, Riz’s character, there’s a lot of sadness. He’s very isolated, hasn’t got any friends and lives a sort of monk-like existence. And Lily’s Sarah, when we first see her, is feeling hunted, and I wanted her to meet with people who could talk about that.”
In the world of corporate whistleblowers, and in the world of corporate security “and things like that,” says Mackenzie, “there are various things that happen to whistleblowers who are intimidated in one way or another to stop what they’re doing. So we’re tapping into that sort of sense of intimidation, which is definitely part of the tension of the film.”
And James is pitch-perfect as a whistleblower. That beige suit is perfect camouflage.
“Some people remain anonymous,” Mackenzie explains. “Successful whistleblowing also means, quite often, financial rewards, but you’re totally shunned by your colleagues for doing so. It’s often a kind of culture where anyone who might blow a whistle on malpractice or whatever is really seen as somebody who has betrayed people, even if they’re attempting to do the right thing. It’s certain types of personalities who tend to be able to do that, who have a very strong sense of right and wrong that they can’t get along to go along. They have to be honest about it.” And, he notes, ”it’s a very murky world.”
And some corporations are very scary. Mackenzie nods knowingly. “I think, speaking generally without being specific, there are large corporations who are obviously prepared to do whatever’s necessary to protect their interests. I think they’re very capable of doing what they need to do,” he says, adding a menacing tone to his voice for effect.
“That’s the game we’re trying to play. … But it’s hopefully quite a fun, intense sort of thriller.”
I tell Mackenzie that I’ve always loved his ability to dip in and out of genres. I remember being at Cannes when his 2016 contemporary western Hell or High Water, starring Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine and Ben Foster, played the Palais. It knocked me for six.
He laughs and says that the “idea of doing the same thing — it’s quite hard making movies, and the idea of doing, feeling like you’re on the treadmill of doing the same thing because you are quite good at it, that feels depressing. And I want to explore new things and explore new possibilities.
“Before, back in the days when we first met, I was far more interested in, I guess, arthouse cinema. And I still have some of those sensibilities, but I tried to make films that I hope play to a wider audience and engage. … I definitely don’t want to do the same thing twice,” he says.
Mackenzie’s just finished shooting his latest movie called Fuze, on locations in and around London.
For Fuze, Mackenzie reunites with Aaron Taylor-Johnson, they did Outlaw King together, and with Worthington for the third time; they also worked together on TV miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven. And they’re joined by Theo James, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Honor Swinton Byrne.
Taylor-Johnson plays a British army bomb disposal officer called to disarm a WWII bomb discovered on a site in west London. But is the bomb a ruse to cover up a heist?
Mackenzie shakes his head. “You’re getting too close,” he warns.
However, to help put my mind at rest, he allows that Mbatha-Raw plays a police superintendent.
This news doesn’t quite do the trick in calming my restless mind. Mackenzie’s playing with me.
I have, after all, seen his scorching cat-and-mouse thriller Relay.
And it’s a masterpiece of misdirection.
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