Oxford, it seems, has had more than its fair share in the limelight on the silver screen.  The imposing grandeur of the ivory towers and the idyllic appeal of the Oxfordshire countryside have drawn numerous filmmakers to shoot their stories here, from the Christchurch setting of Harry Potter to the dramatic opening sequences of last year's Enduring Love.  This is all well and good, but the local film industry (in so far as there is one) would be better served by a project that was truly rooted here, as opposed to one that packs up the cameras at the end of the day and hot-foots it back to the capital faster than you can say M40.

The Jigsaw of Life is just such a project, produced by local outfit Creative Gold under the direction of Mark McDermott, making his feature film debut with this emotional thriller.  In many ways it's a promising start - it's beautifully shot, and there are strong performances by the cast in some genuinely touching scenes.  It is let down, however, by a rather clunky plot that stumbles into the pit-holes of overblown amateur philosophising, and is exacerbated by an unconvincing script.

The story centres around the unfortunate Duncan, who escapes to university after breaking free from an unhappy childhood at the hands of an abusive stepfather.  The scenes of Duncan's childhood misery are shown in flashback, a device that can be used to great effect to explain why characters are as they are, and to reveal possible reasons for later actions.   Given that one of the defining themes of the film is self-discovery, it is a shame that the flashback device is not used to its full effect, but instead leaves the viewer without any clue as to why, for example, the stepfather directs all his rage at Duncan, and the characters appear all the less convincing
because of this.

The plot continues with Duncan finally finding happiness in a relationship at university, but gritty realism comes crashing back in when his girlfriend cheats on him with the rather slimy and apparently unstable Keith.  This love triangle precipitates a climactic showdown years later when Keith tries to kill his lover and his rival, but the events are unconvincing because again we have no understanding of why the characters are behaving as they are, except perhaps to serve the purposes of satisfying the film's self-proclaimed description as "emotional thriller".  Keith, for example, is seen sabotaging his parents' car, an action which results in their deaths, purely because they expressed themselves a little disappointed at his exam results.  On a holiday to Ireland, Duncan and his travel buddy befriend a local man and his flame-haired daughter, who cooks them Irish stew and invites them to the dance in the local village, to be sure.  The cliché is compounded by a cringe-worthy flashback of the daughter's birth, which can't have been earlier than 1982 but could equally be 1852, with father pacing in the living room downstairs and mother giving birth upstairs, then dying immediately after for reasons unknown, as reported by a gorily blood-spattered doctor.

The film is ambitious and earnest in its attempts to convey one individual's journey of self-discovery, the pinnacle of which is the realisation that life, like a jigsaw, is made up of a multitude of smaller fragments and that we must try to see the bigger picture in order to understand each of these individually.  However, even this simplistic message is not persuasive, and at the end of the film one is left with a feeling of disappointment.  The local film industry could do better; but in the meantime, all Oxford's hopes are not lost: isn't there another Harry Potter film is due out soon?

Alison Gowland 07/05/05

See Also: The Jigsaw of Life Official Website