Kieran Evans is attentive to place, music and the awkwardness of physical intimacy. We find more to value in his handling of actors than in his dramatic writing: Kelly + Victor makes its attraction persuasive but gives its lovers too little character.
Fi1m perspective
In Kelly + Victor (2012), Evans keeps tenderness visible even when the lovers’ encounters become painful. We were unsettled because the affection made it impossible to dismiss what we were watching as mere provocation. Antonia Campbell-Hughes and Julian Morris make the attraction believable, and Evans gives them room to do so without making the relationship comfortable. The disappointment is how little else we learn about the people involved. His direction holds our attention after his screenplay has begun to lose it.
His route into fiction helps explain that attention to physical detail. Music videos and documentaries came first, including Finisterre (2003), co-directed with Paul Kelly for Saint Etienne, and From Here to Before (2008), his portrait of Vashti Bunyan. Evans also edited Finisterre and shot From Here to Before, experience that makes his concern with how a place looks and sounds unsurprising. In Kelly + Victor, he pays close attention to Liverpool’s post-industrial spaces and the contrasting countryside. The music works, too, helping sustain the film’s uneasy mood.
The trouble in that first narrative feature is Evans’s adaptation of Niall Griffiths’s novel. The couple already have enough difficulty between them, yet the screenplay keeps adding complications and surrounding stories until their suffering begins to feel arranged. We need to understand why these people make their decisions, especially when the decisions are difficult to share. Evans relies on his actors to make those choices convincing without giving them enough character to work with. The dialogue can be awkward, but the thin characterisation does more damage.
After Kelly + Victor, Evans returned to music-related documentaries and live films. The Outer Edges (2013), made with Karl Hyde and shot by Evans himself, follows routes around London’s margins; Nowhere Is Home (2014) reunites him with Paul Kelly for a film about Dexys. These collaborations continue an interest in musicians and places that predates his fictional lovers. For another drama, we would want fewer imposed troubles and more time to discover who the characters are when they are not suffering.
Biography
Kieran Evans is a Welsh film director and screenwriter. Born in St Davids, Pembrokeshire, he studied art in Carmarthen and Newport before moving to London, where he began working in the film industry as a runner and later directed music videos.
His feature debut Kelly + Victor (2012), which he wrote and directed, was adapted from Niall Griffiths’s novel. The film won the BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer in 2014. Evans has also directed documentaries, including Finisterre (2003) with Saint Etienne, a portrait of Vashti Bunyan, and several films about the Manic Street Preachers.
