Falling, Looking, Caring:Red Roadas Melodrama

Abstract

This article examines Red Road as a melodrama and woman's film. It argues that the film is traductively real and melodramatic, and that conceiving the film in melodramatic terms is contrary to the way in which it has been defined in public discourses and academic analysis. Red Road is film melodrama in a number of related ways, via: tropes of narrative and character; a tendency to look back, work through and act out in a melancholy and melodramatic fashion; an emphasis on familialism and redemption; and the nomination of its central character as a woman and mother. Red Road is a maternal text in familiar and complex ways – for example, in the way in which CCTV is inscribed with guardianship and care, and also via Jackie's presentation as a sexual and narrative riddle and other-worldly figure. Jackie's sphinx-like status, the paper argues, connects with Red Road's multiple and twilight qualities, and this is supported by the film's affective elements, including its treatment of the Red Road flats. This treatment helps to engender Red Road's qualities not only of redemption and rebirth, but also of memory and revision.

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