- Ten seemingly unconnected characters on a London tube train talk about their lives, thoughts and aspirations.
- This film is a series of interviews supposedly taken at random on a tube train - with disparate characters whose only connection is that they all inhabit the same seat at various times. The interviewees talk directly to camera in answer to unheard questions in a casual manner. They explain how difficult it is to live and travel in London - they all have their various gripes and worries and all see the problems from different (their own) perspectives. The images are rough and grainy giving the impression that this has been captured covertly. We have a complete cross section of Londoners and those who happen to find themselves here.
The monologues start prosaically enough but as the film progresses they begin to take on a slightly odder feel - its as if there is something in the background that informs their answers, something not directly alluded to but nevertheless there. We witness new, stranger/unsettling characters - people who talk about things in the abstract.
Almost imperceptibly the dialogue begins to change - first, instead of just talking about their own world, their own thoughts, they begin to finish those of the others - finish thoughts and then actual sentences. This in turn becomes a stylised pattern of replies, almost metaphysical - once more changing until we find them talking in blank verse.
These ghostly responses (still unsettling in their casual matter-of-fact manner) seem to harmonise with the visuals - these too we realise are ghostly.
And then they confront the hidden presence - the July bombings that no one wanted to address - and we realise that these people, randomly selected, are in fact probably ghosts themselves - remembering a time before murder , and that they were its victims. And as ghosts will do they all fade away and we are left with just the empty tube train on its final journey.
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Top Gap
By what name was Notes from the Underground (2012) officially released in Canada in English?
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