This film (along with a screening of Discrepancy) was seen at and reviewed for Cambridge Film Festival 2010:
DISCREPANCY, the accompanying short to CROSS-CHANNEL, was an aural onslaught. The source (manifesto?) from the 1950s, if true, which the voice-over acknowledged was not much surprise - hectoring was much more in fashion, just as experimentally yoking it to disparate images and challenging viewers to object would have been at any time from the early twentieth century onwards.
Fair enough, the thesis was duly counterposed (and so modified) by antithesis, etc., but we agree with THE TRIP's Steve that art-house films are where it's at, so does what this film separately said and did really constitute a discrepancy of interest? I doubt it.
CROSS-CHANNEL deliciously and almost provocatively relishes showing us, albeit not in the technically challenging audacity of a single take, the way out to the sea from Portsmouth, and we only cut between views with any greater frequency after this sequence. Maybe this is what the narrator likes looking at, and his commonplace feeling that the ship is all his (and hence that the two men who unwittingly attract his attention are a kind of intruding temptation to him), and so must possess it, is what he proceeds to try to do with them.
He wants to know what he cannot know by eavesdropping, although that seems perfectly successful (contrary to his claim that he could not catch everything over dinner), and so feels free to substitute his imaginings for being actively present to the person with whom he asserts a seven-year relationship and to spending time with whom he is supposed to be looking forward so keenly.
As I observed in the post-screening question session, this film reminded me of the t.v. series called (The) Canterbury Tales, and, because of that, of Chaucer's own story-telling. With that feeling of reverence for the journey, which almost smacks of pilgrimage and of enjoying it as much as where it takes the traveller, one is led to the parallel feeling that the heart of the film is not so much what is told, as the telling itself.
Ron Peck made clear that he had felt, in this unseen narrator, a person whom he did not much like because of his ascriptions of bad motives to the two men, but there is also his total self-obsessed certainty that we want to know what he has to say. Here, the parallel with Chaucer is so relevant, because the more grotesque of his pilgrims are highly self-revelatory (through some sense of needing to tell the truth about themselves?), even though that ultimately condemns them out of their own mouths when they seek to charm us.
Where this film also wins is not so much in what we are shown the men pictured doing or talking about (because, perhaps, we do not quite share his fascination), but in its sure pacing. The narrator neatly delivers us back to dock in such exquisite detail that we need never wonder how what he keeps calling 'vessels' are brought alongside the quay with such grace and beauty.
