Rustling grass. The thin, warbling sound of an oboe. One voice barely heard over the noise, reading out numbers and the phonic alphabet. £115,000 give or take on its opening weekend. A woman standing alone in a field, staring out across the flat planes. One slow, eternal zoom which reveals that this woman’s hair is greasy, lank upon her shoulders, and the left hand side of her face is bruised and grazed.
‘I’m not sure where to begin,’ she says in voice-over, ‘I climbed in the boot of a car in Derbyshire two weeks ago. My name is Miriam O’Neal. I’m twenty nine. I have no known next of kin. I don’t know where I’m going. I recall very little of where I’ve been.’
Her eyes begin to move, fluttering from right to left with one brief moment where she stares straight down the barrel of the camera, and then away again. The wind howls. Then: a wallet on a table, from which spill business cards printed with the film’s credits. Fring intersperses this slow sequence with flashes of unknown scenes: Meadowhall Interchange, old industrial buildings with the windows smashed in. Sinead O’Connor’s 1994 track ‘Tiny Grief Song’ shudders out as we move, finally, to a many-times-folded copy of the poem from which the film takes its title: Anne Sexton’s Her Kind, with a slow zoom onto the final stanza, the woman who is not afraid to die. And so begins one of the most quietly celebrated films of the last two decades.
The Last Bright Routes, Ruth Fring’s 2003 sophomore release, has always been a polarising film. Many call it obvious, on the nose, and even its truest fans will acquiesce to its moments of sentimentality, which are made even more jarring due to its otherwise brusque portrayal of a woman whose life has come apart at its seams. However, the case is often made that the film is obvious because depression itself is obvious: ‘It’s a remarkably honest portrayal of the struggle that comes with that sort of depression,’ says Dr. Uma Samuels, who has spent most of her professional career exploring artistic depictions of women’s mental health, ‘the
kind of chronic mental struggle that Fring was seeking to portray is, by and large, a very boring one. It’s less Kirsten Dunst in a cobwebbed dress and more pissing yourself because you can’t get out of bed.’
The mundanity of which Samuels speaks is exemplified by the actual look of the film. Most of the film takes place on wet, desolate moorlands, motorways, in small towns where the only thing to do is leave. The fluorescent light which marks most of the film is sickly and pale, washing out Miriam’s already ghostly face. There is little warmth throughout the film because there is very little warmth in Miriam’s life—this is the kind of analysis that would get you most of the way to a B in a Film Studies A-Level exam. However, as writer Gretel Thompson told me, while it isn’t unfair to call Routes obvious, it’s ‘a feature not a bug that so much of it is in your face.’ Thompson became obsessed with Fring as an undergraduate, seeing in her films a bleak yet luscious depiction of living beyond chronic mental health issues. ‘I think she scratches the same itch [as] Woolf and Plath.’
This was a view I heard echoed outside the Prince Charles Cinema last week, speaking to people on their way into the cinema’s anniversary screening. One woman told me she spent five years suicidally depressed, and that Fring’s film ‘was the only thing that got through to me. It was the thing that made me get help. Even now, if I get bad, I watch it again; it’s like an outlet, like the feeling goes through me and leaves me unharmed.’
What starts as a Kerouac-esque romp through the upper half of the island becomes a waking nightmare. Miriam spends much of the film in coach stations, drifting through homes of friends-of-friends, curled up in the bath against the people she is convinced are out to get her. But where Sal Paradise is made free by his endless time on the road, Miriam is haunted by it; looking through a coach window, she sees a reservoir and then a vision of herself walking into its depths, the water closing over the top of her head. Sleeping on a fraying mattress in an old factory, she sees her own silhouette before a window, and then watches herself fall the endless storeys to the ground. As the film continues, Fring teases us with the reveal of the final shot—Miriam gets into numerous scrapes, being beaten by an acquaintance on her way to Scotland, and later opens a car door when she’s hitchhiking and threatens to throw herself out when scared by a lecherous driver (though ultimately doesn’t, instead climbing out on the Scotch Corner and walking along the roaring motorway), but none of these incidents leave her with the film’s final injuries.
In the end, it is revealed that these injuries are the result of Miriam throwing herself against a wall in an old farmhouse somewhere along the Pennine Way. ‘It’s a reflection on how we internalise external violence,’ Samuels says, ‘yes, Miriam does this to herself, but this is a woman who has, variously, over the course of the film, been beaten by a man she barely knows, been thrown in the boot of a car, been threatened with all sorts of sexual violence that we never see occur but which Fring implies exists as an undercurrent throughout the film. There is no way for Miriam to pass through her life unscathed. That is what Fring is getting at.’
This narrative uncertainty prompted a harsh response. The purposefully stumbling dialogue, which seems to pre-empt the mumblecore of the early 2010s but was still a rarity in 2003, was a particular point of contention: this is made particularly clear by Sight and Sound’s scathing review of the film, which calls its acting ‘so stilted. . . so completely, utterly stiff that the viewer is made to doubt that these actors have the ability to revert to human normalcy when Fring calls “cut” and the cameras turn off.’ Kermode and Mayo celebrated the film’s inward nature, with Kermode praising its bold depiction of a particularly feminine kind of psychosis, but called it nonetheless ‘a chore to get through.’ Even Andrea Arnold—patron saint of confident, difficult films about suffering, complicated women—called the film an unsatisfyingly hard watch, saying in a 2004 interview that, while she saw the similarities between her work and Fring’s, ‘I don’t think it’s brave to make a plodding two hour feature and then say all your bad choices were deliberate artistic decisions.’ While the film, against all odds, won a BAFTA, it remained largely out of sight of the British mainstream—the BAFTA, too, was in Production Design, which Fring would later say ‘is a bit like having not won at all’.
And what of Fring? Her producers collected the BAFTA, famously. She wrote a novel that was longlisted for the Booker in 2009, long after The Last Bright Routes had been all but forgotten in the public consciousness. Speaking on Desert Island Discs in 2010, Fring said, ‘It seems a pity to wait until you’re told to get off the stage instead of leaving it under your own steam. I have wandered the wilderness and emerged victorious holding the lion’s head high above my own. Who could want more?’
I began my attempts to reach Fring last autumn. I exhausted all my professional dignity pleading with various contacts for a way of getting in touch with the lost director. As I
braced myself to give up, I heard back. A scanned letter appeared in my inbox. Two handwritten pages, in a blocky, solid script, inviting me to an address in Hereford.
And so three weeks ago I arrived at her house. People began to appear. Dressed in off-white linen, popped collars. Wide, trusting faces, like they were tending to sheep on moors instead of living in a large house on the border of Wales. ‘Where are you?’ I called into the home populated by everyone apart from the woman who I’d come to see. ‘I’m here, Ruth. I’m here for you.’
‘I’m not sure where to begin,’ a woman said by the side of the stairs. ‘I recall very little of where I’ve been,’ said a man standing beside her.
And then, as if summoned by the trumpets sounding the end of days, Fring appeared at the top of the stairs. Her dark hair going grey at the roots, tucked behind her ears. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’
What followed was five hours of conversation which I neither recorded nor remember. Fring is a woman who lives within the world but is not a part of it. The Last Bright Routes a film which only makes sense knowing that Fring lives in a house lit by candlelight. Hills stretching on beyond windows, flatland leading out to the horizon. I left the meeting dazed. I left my car in the driveway and called an Uber back to my hotel. As the car pulled away, I saw the house’s inhabitants piling in around the door: watching me leave, white apparitions in the bruising dusk.
I returned to London and slept from Thursday to Monday. I saw Fring’s face melting into Miriam’s. My worlds began to bleed into one another, and it was these shifting faces—more than anyone else I’ve spoken to, more than any reading I’ve done for this article, that made me understand The Last Bright Routes at last. The bounds of reality become blurred, interchangeable. The things we live through nobody else has ever lived through.
‘I want it to end,’ Miriam says towards the end of the film, ‘anything is easier than waking up today, tomorrow, for the next sixty years, waiting for dementia to get me, waiting for the next bottle of pills to finally be the one that does it. I want it to be over. I don’t want to hurt anymore.’ And the woman from Sheffield says, ‘You could still get better,’ sitting in the dark over a coffee, holding up an ash-tray for Miriam, ‘the light still comes over the horizon.’
‘I know,’ Miriam says, ‘I know.’
All of this to say that we all climbed into the boot of a car in Derbyshire two weeks ago. All of this to say that the car is still rattling over the motorway and we’ve lost the feeling in three of our fingers. I’d a terrible broken heart, which is to say nothing of what happened to yours. Miriam O’Neal lives on. She still walks the motorways. She sings out in dark rooms, even now. Listen close and you’ll hear her, too.