Press

Henry Coombes’s first big film work is highly engaging and yet strangely unsettling. By Jack Mottram

Laddy and the Lady tells the story of a disobedient golden retriever doing his best to assist his tweedy mistress ona pheasant shoot. We see Laddy struggling to stay, striving to locate a downed bird and tripping over branches as the increasingly frustrated Lady bellows commands at her hapless pet. Meanwhile, Quentin and his dog Jack, well-trained and well-groomed in contrast to Laddy’s panic and patchy pelt, calmly go about the business of hunting. But laddy wins out in the end, managing to erturn with the last pheasant, a success that sees him lavished with praise, his earlier misdemeanours forgotten. We are given a clue to Laddy’s troubled ways. As the beaters and drivers make a racket, the dog retreats into a daydream, and the action shifts to the study of a stately home. here, Laddy and his mother lie in repose, and then, once the touching scene has sunk in, Henry coombes cuts to a grotesque close-up shot of the puppy suckling at his mother’s teat, with milk spilling across the screen and amplified slurping on the soundtrack. But laddy and Jack are not dogs, they are men dressed as dogs, and sothe cycle of punishment and reward, and Laddy’s flashback to his happy suckling have a whiff of the perverse about them. This is a theme that has surfaced in Coombes’ work before. His 2004 solo show at Sorcha Dallas included watercolours of a businessman pinned down by a giant eagle, and a widow with homonculus earrings. With Laddy and the Lady it is clearer than ever that Coombes is laughing at the idea of an artist exposing discomforting aspects of his unconcious, rather than trawling his id for inspiration. Coombes’ treatment of class is similarly slippery. The shotgun blasts and hail of falling pheasants, as well as the structural use of opposing pairs, inevitably call to mind the farcical social commentary of Jean Renoir’s 1939 classic La Regle du Jeu, but where Renoir sought to portray the pre-war haute bourgeoisie “dancing on a volcano”, Coombes homes in on and glorifies the insignificant relationship between a barking mistress and her dumb servant. A rich work then, and one that stands up to repeat viewings despite the slim storyline and repetitive dialogue. Tis is in part thanks to the disquieting underbelly of the heartwarming little tale, but Coombes also has an artist’seye for film. The set is a white-walled room, with a forest suggested by dessicated branches splashed with paint. The costumes are at once cartoonish and convinicing, never allowing the viewer to forget that Laddy and Jack are grown men playing animals, but oddly accurate despite their home-made, jerry-rigged nature. there is even a brief scene of a man-pheasant in his death throes that might stand as a work in its own right, an immaculately posed tableau vivant. All together, the minimal yet lavish look and its melding of simple storytelling and eloquent unspoken themes makes Coombes’ first major film work an unsettling and rewarding experience.