Review of Bait

A remarkable independent micro-budget film, which touches on issues of class and power, and culture, and masculinity...it's black and white, shot on tiny old-fashioned 16mm cameras with sound entirely dubbed on in post-production. The dialogue is terse and monosyllabic, the images very dark and stark. 

It's set in a Cornish village over-run with second-home owners. The main character, Martin, has together with his estranged brother sold the family home to a fairly awful family like that, who come down from London with bags of stuff from Waitrose so that they can have the food that they need. Martin is a fisherman but he no longer has a boat, and he does the best he can to fish from the beach with an anchored net. There's lots of footage of dark and rusty fittings. His brother, Stephen, still has a boat, but he doesn't fish - he takes tourists for little trips, and also takes out anglers - so they fish but he doesn't.

Not having a boat makes Martin less of a man, and not using his boat for fishing makes Stephen less of a man, especially in Martin's eyes. I was struck by how many penises there are in the film - one of the trippers on Stephen's boat wears an inflatable penis costume, and another wears a plastic false nose-and-glasses thing that's shaped like penis, and is later left behind on the boat with the other trash. 

Martin leaves fish wrapped in plastic bags on the doors of houses in his street - I think they belong to his mother and his ex, though I'm not sure. Hunting - for fish, or anything, is an intensely male occupation, and the inability of the Cornish men to fish and make a living from fishing is a sign that they have been emasculated. Another man has given up fishing to make a living from driving a taxi. Martin jokes bitterly that all the fishing paraphernalia with which the incoming-family have decorated what was his family home - all the ropes and chains that they've hung on the walls - makes it look like a sex dungeon.

Afterwards I couldn't help thinking about the surly, poor, hopeless Cornish people and how they came to be that way. The fish they catch still have value, to retailers and to the pub where they are made into meals for the incomers, but they don't provide a sustainable income to the fishermen and their families. They're screwed by regional economic inequality (their homes are too cheap compared to the cost of homes in London), the monopoly power of supermarkets - the sellers of fish are fragmented and in competition with each other, but the wholesale buyers have monopoly power that no government is willing to address. They're undermined by technology (other fishing fleets that hoover up everything in the fishing grounds cheaper than they can with their little labour-intensive boats) and by geopolitics, because no government is going to stand up to protect British fishing grounds from incoming fleets, not when their are other industries that are more important.