Lone Scherfig’s The Riot Club probes U.K. class divide

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      As you read this, the U.K. government is busy trying to explain how and why a group of powerful establishment figures who allegedly raped and murdered children had its activities covered up for decades. The details beggar belief, and yet there they are. Scotland Yard is investigating three separate homicides in a VIP pedophile ring that might have included Margaret Thatcher’s recently deceased former home secretary, Leon Brittan.

      In light of this, Lone Scherfig’s The Riot Club—opening Friday (March 27)—arrives like the lid being blown from a dark, impossible-to-believe rumour. It might seem excessive, but the tale of an Oxford University–based secret society indulging in a night of monstrous debauchery and violence—like posh droogs, if you will—has its roots in the real-life Bullingdon Club, which once included U.K. prime minister David Cameron. Once ushered into their cozy lifetime positions in Westminster, as the film suggests, Britain’s “ruling class” can, apparently, depend on a very old and delicate system of mutual blackmail, compromise, and immunity.

      “Yes, and even David Cameron, when he is confronted with the fact that he was in the Bullingdon Club, which is a strong parallel, he never says, ‘Let’s close the whole thing down,’ or ‘Let’s stop this from happening,’ ” remarks director Scherfig, calling the Georgia Straight as she drives along the east coast of Sweden. “He says, ‘Oh, we were just boys…’ ”

      It might seem a bit counterintuitive for the Danish filmmaker to take on a subject so close to the heart of Britain’s historic class divide. Indeed, Scherfig says she continues to work in Britain—this is her third U.K.–based feature—because “the scripts are so good and the actors are so good that I keep coming back.”

      But Scherfig brings a necessarily detached eye to the subject matter, even if she can’t quite contain her awe at how openly Britain’s rich and poor “really do hate one another”. Working with screenwriter Laura Wade (whose play, Posh, provided the source), Scherfig sought to maintain some balance in her depiction of rich young men doing unspeakable things, drunk on “tradition” (and tons of booze).

      “You also have to warm to them and see that there is some innocence to them, otherwise the film would just be one long bout of throwing mud,” she says. But even with her cool outsider’s approach, the filmmaker can barely conceal the disgust she felt while researching the project.

      “Some of the real initiation rituals are worse than in the film,” she says. “They’re appalling. They have to burn a 50-pound bank note in front of a tramp, for instance, which, I think, couldn’t be more tasteless, and they have to kill a live fox with Champagne bottles—the kinds of things you only do because you can. It’s not that they don’t know how to behave. They’re so well educated, and so well bred, and so smart, so it’s not that they’re primitive, because they’re not. And that is why you have more right to expect that they should treat their privilege with responsibility.”

      Follow Adrian Mack on Twitter @adrianmacked.

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