Piercing the Membrane: Mark Jenkin's BAIT (2019)

**MAY CONTAIN SOME SPOILERS**

BAIT by Mark Jenkin

"The 'Other Britain'- from urban and northern England to Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Northern Ireland."

- Payton, Phillip. ‘Cornwall in Context: the New Cornish Historiography.’ 

Cornish Studies. 5 (1997) pp.9-20 (p.9)

Mark Jenkin's amazing film BAIT, which Mark Kermode declared not only his film of the year but his film of the decade, has often been labelled as an art film, mainly I suppose for seemingly superfluous takes lingering on faces and scenes that at first make no sense, and the choice of production, using an old hand-wound bolex camera. Not only is the film in stark black and white, rich with crackles of light flitting across the old-fashioned film, but light saturates scenes; a shot of a police car with its lights on creates deep dark silhouettes surrounding the authoritative vehicle as it throws light crawling out. The drawn out shots of faces show the stark crags and colourations of age; a bristly fisherman's face with a worn cap is rife with dark lines, while a pale, young girl's face is radiant. I will talk a lot here about class and wealth division which are evident not just in communities but across the nation, with wealth being harboured in some areas and drawn out of others, such as Cornwall. If you have watched the film and have not got a feel of the division that stalks the lives of the characters then I am not sure we have seen the same film.

 Edward Rowe's Martin Ward works on his tidal nets; BAIT by Mark Jenkin 2019

The Divide
Although at times obvious in this otherwise misty world, stark comparisons are drawn between the wealthy second-home owners ("Tourists" as Martin calls an increasingly irate Tim) and the working class, struggling natives. Through consecutive shots near the start we are shown the difference in footwear (fancy shoes; rigger boots) hands in work (typing at a laptop inside; tying knots in nets) and vehicles (pristine large land rover; beaten-up and self-fixed flat bed truck.) After setting up the viewer to notice these comparisons, we can draw them out easily throughout the film. The use of fishing gear; nets and ropes are a constant presence in Martin, Steven and Neil's life, being the means with which they work and their ancestors have worked. The Leigh family, when they modify the Ward's old house, "Skipper's Cottage", not only remove the pantry, an old-fashioned and dank working-class room of a functional purpose, but decorate the living space with a porthole and old fishing gear, which in this decorative form is so strange to Martin he describes it to Steven as looking like a "sex dungeon".  In the pub we see the divide encapsulated who gets to play pool in the pub- Wenna, the local girl who works in the pub says it is 'winner stays on', a rule founded in using skill, accepting defeat, and letting all have a chance, while Hugo says that's false, that they 'had money down', and thus are entitled to play.

The Ward's old family home, now the Leigh's second home. BAIT by Mark Jenkin 2019

Justice
The construction and serving of justice is another element of the divide; the legal system is shown to be in servitude to the ruling class. While the Leigh parents distance themselves from the parking dispute by complaining to the authorities, pitting Martin instead against the 'clamping company' and they don't think twice about calling the police over a spat when teenage Wenna headbutts Tim, leaving her with a night at Camborne police station and with the financial burden of getting home. Martin instead relies on a more individual, tactful justice. Hugo damages one of his lobster pots and steals Martin's catch. Instead of calling the police or even Hugo's parents, Martin makes Hugo repair the lobster cage in front of everyone in the pub, forcing Hugo to atone for his crime there and then. I found this scene quite interesting, as once the tension has blown over we realise that Hugo to some extent enjoys fixing the lobster pot, as he fairly calmly attends to the work; from his introduction we see that Hugo wants to be involved in the fisherman's work (or at least 'play' at it) and this is the closest he comes to it. Grounded rules that are arbitrarily set don't necessarily make sense in a place where people are struggling to make ends meet on the sea; the Leigh's stick to the rules, getting Martin's truck clamped where it is parked by the harbourside allowing him to work, while Martin, who is trying to make money to save up for a boat and has a fairly sparse house, makes sure to gift his neighbours a fairly generous portion of his daily catch, adhering perhaps to an older code of the village.

Martin Ward and Wenna Kowalski in the Pub (Edward Rowe and Chloe Endean) BAIT by Mark Jenkin 2019

The Bubble
The plot and how it is shown to us, with later scenes appearing right from the start, creates a wheel of events, that, though a linear story, have been shown to us circularly, creating a trapped effect. Even a few of the jokes and events work in circles; Martin teases Hugo as he goes to fish with a harpoon gun to "leave some fish for the rest of us," but then later Hugo robs Martin of his lobster catch. Martin is told by a reveller embarking on Steven's boat to "chill out", a line Martin repeats to the man later as he vomits off the harbourside. The psychogeography at play in the film also creates the sense of an isolated bubble of a setting, enhanced by the small cast and smaller cluster of filming locations. This bubble, while a place of struggle and problems, a sense enhanced by the look of the film and the ominous soundtrack, and also the fact that all speech had to be overdubbed, lending a sort of clear-cut disjointedness to the lines, is evidently also a paradise in some ways, inviting tourists to pierce the bubble. This sense isn't unique to the film, as Cornwall, though considered a county, is one of the six Celtic nations (with Wales, Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man and Brittany) a small, fairly isolated region that, though with its unique culture and nationhood, is overlooked by many in England (and even all of Britain) as simply part of England; a funny toe jutting into the Atlantic.

Watching BAIT and then writing this during the COVID-19 pandemic there arises a new level to the second-home Anglo-Cornish tensions seen in BAIT. Locals in Cornwall, with a sparse and elderly population and a healthcare infrastructure that struggles with rural outreach, amount of hospitals and funding, watch as wealthy Britons arrive at their second homes to 'wait it out', potentially bringing the virus further and further into contact with the rural country from places where the virus has already hit such as London.

The Beginning, and End, shot of Edward Rowe's Martin Ward walking to the harbourside. BAIT by Mark Jenkin 2019