Affairs of the Art (2021) Movie Script
I'm into art now.
I'm drinking from the
cup of creativity again.
I back on track.
Besotted with drawing.
It's all I want to do.
I think I'm quite good at it, you know,
in a Rousseau-esque sort of way.
Ive was my model.
I work him to the bone.
He is very tolerant, though.
Last week when I asked him to be a nude
descending a staircase, he said...
Who we referencing, Ber?
Do a show about your owny.
Art.
I'm obsessed.
I think I'm turning
into my sister, Beverly.
She never liked drawing or
playing with dolls like me.
She liked insects.
Wood lice and beetles.
She kept them all in a big fish bowl.
She'd wait until they packed out
and she'd put them in coffins
she'd made out of little raisin boxes.
Then she'd bury them in the garden.
After at while she'd dig them up
to see what had happened to them.
She was really obsessed.
Melvin lived next door.
And one day Bev borrowed
his favorite train set,
so that our pet mouse,
Peter, could ride in it.
She'd bride him with a
promise of sexual favors.
Bev forced the mouse to drive the train,
but she soon got bored with that.
So she put things on the
rails to cause derailments,
catastrophes, she called them.
She got more and more ruthless.
Finally, she tried to blow
up the little crossing
with a firework.
She hoped to bump off the mouse,
but the carpet caught fire
and the mouse turned brown, but survived.
Well later he did die of trauma.
She gave the mouse, the works.
A state funeral into the garden.
She played on
Dad's Dansette record player.
She made us all wear black.
I found these the other
day - my first drawings.
I used to draw all the
time. I just couldn't stop.
The walls of my bedroom
are completely covered with my drawings.
I dunno. It was just like a drug.
I used to get into trouble at school
for drawing all the time,
instead of doing proper work.
Once I got caught drawing
our teacher Ms. Maps.
In the nude. She knew it was her.
She recognized the hairs
poking through the holes in her stockings.
She just went quiet, like a mouse.
Oh yeah, Miss Maps.
Drawing's all I ever think about now.
I draw all the time,
but I still make things
for people too, but that last jumper
I knitted for Deedee's little girl where
It's lovely Beryl, It's really artistic.
Only I never saw her
actually wearin' it.
All I ever wanted to do
was to go to art school,
be creative, have a career.
But then I got pregnant with Colin.
Yeah, Colin, another
obsessive in the family.
One day when he was young,
he brought home this pigeon.
It couldn't fly, it had a broke wing.
He called it Percy.
Oh, Colin adored Percy.
They were inseparable.
He did everything for
him. It was a love affair.
He even hoisted him up on the clothesline,
So he could relate to other birds.
He built Percy a state
of the art pigeon coop.
It had everything. Mezzanine, floors,
Central heating run by a steam engine.
It was a palace in the garden.
In the house we had nothing,
no bathroom or nothing.
Colin worshiped Percy.
It ended in tragedy though.
He saw the culprit.
Colin vowed revenge.
The crossbow he made was precision built.
The arrows had Percy's feathers in them.
He practiced firing at particular
piece of wall and waited.
and waited.
Colin shot the cat.
It landed in the neighbors garden,
she was a cat fanatic.
She called the police.
They called it a crime of passion.
Colin got off with a caution.
He stayed totally obsessed
with precise, technical detail.
You know, things like
railway signaling systems.
His Yamaha organ.
Screw threads.
Well, TPI flag angles for metric UNC
and UNF screws at 30 degrees,
our total threat angle of 60 degrees.
And he taught himself to speak Dutch.
I can't believe he's 38
and still lives at home with us.
I wish I could have a bloody girlfriend
like a normal bloke.
Yeah. Obsession. The whole
family's obsessed or something.
Colin, Beverly, now me.
I blame our Grandma's
influence, she was obsessed too.
With pickling.
Gran preserved everything.
Pickled in big jars.
Cabbage, eggs, pigs
trotters, cows tongues,
lambs, chicks, nothing was safe from her.
Bev loved going to gram's house
just to stare at all the jars,
Wow.
especially the beetroot.
And sometimes she stole them.
I always knew because it left
crimson stains on her arms.
She wouldn't wash them for days.
She cried when the stains disappeared.
When grandma died,
the woman next door came in
and laid her out on the
table in the living room.
She put pennies on her eyes
and a bucket underneath the
table with holy water in it.
I saw Bev sneak in.
She stayed in there for hours.
Just staring and fiddling
with Gran's body.
She wasn't sad though.
When she came out, she said,
"I kicked the bucket."
Mom did think Bev was
a bit strange though.
Well we all did.
She was quite weird though.
Like when we went to the seaside,
she never wanted to play
on the beach with me.
She always went to the
carcus store to stare
at all the pickled
fish. She was entranced.
She saved up to buy a jar of jelly deans.
She never actually ate them though.
She just brought them out on
special occasions to look at.
I used to find decayin' food in her room.
Hidden in drawers.
When I asked her about it all she said was
There's bread in the British
museum that's 2000 years old.
Its fantastic Beryl.
She made a necklace out
of old, dried up carrots
with rhinestones stuck in them.
She wore it to her tenth birthday party.
With earrings made out of dead wasps.
I drew ponies in my scrapbook.
But Bev had folders of
mausoleums, mummies, and tombs.
Vladimir.
She told me she had
dreams of meeting Lenin
in this tomb in Moscow.
She idolized him.
Vladimir, Vladimir,
where are we going today?
Ah, Beverly, surely I was
dreaming I was in London
on Primrose Field eating ice cream.
Could we get a cone? And
have my favorite piroshki?
Of course, Beverly. We can
go there now. Take my hand.
Are we nearly there?
Course it is all fantasy,
but she was obsessed with him.
She even joined the young communist league
to get a free trip to
Moscow, to see his tour.
But the bus only went
as far as East Berlin.
So Bev quit the party in disgust.
That's the thing about Bev.
She always went for it.
Fanatical.
Do not yell, Colin.
This is a seminal piece.
My first dynamic self portrait.
I'm asserting my identity.
Making my physical mark.
It's a new dawn for me.
Like Bev had when she discovered Trigger.
Trigger Gets Stuffed in California.
Well, that was it, wasn't it?
Suddenly a whole new world
opened up before her eyes.
Bev stuffed everything after that.
She had a book of instructions.
She'd learned it all by heart.
When our dog Rudy died,
she stuffed him too.
Then she put Rudy on the mantelpiece.
Mum said, Oh thank God,
no more dogs doodoos.
When Bev was 18, she met this American GI.
Hi, I'm Lester. Can I
take your daughter out, sir?
Well that was it. She married him
and moved straight to
California. Didn't last though.
Bev spent more time at the
Trigger museum with her stuff.
Can you believe this?
Dad said,
I knew it. She's bloody trigger happy.
After Lester, Bev got to
a string of rich husbands
and got a pint of alimony.
She's had three boob
jobs, butt deductions,
lip collagen, and six face tucks.
And she spent a fortune fixing her teeth.
Don't I look fantastic?
Body sculpture. She calls it.
She started her first business in LA
stuffing pets for celebs.
Her latest gigs called
"Remains to be Seen."
High-tech cryogenics for her choose.
She's big time now.
And what have I done with my life?
I'm 59, married with a grownup geek,
still working in a factory
dreaming about what I should have done.
I could have gone to art school,
being somebody being a contender.
Now it's the bloody change, right?
I look like shit. I've lost
my looks, my figure's gone,
and to cap it all, the other night
I caught Iver watching one
of those twerking videos.
And you know what he said?
Come on and shake your
ass, shake your ass girl
Why don't you get one of
those butt lift things Beryl?
But to be absolutely honest,
I did secretly find off the internet.
But when I got it, well,
I spent about two bloody hours with it.
Whatever I did it wouldn't fit.
Oh, fuck it.
Why am I doing this
shit? Oh I hate myself.
To cap it all, later on,
Iver found it in the pocket on the sofa.
Oh what's this, open it
by mistake? Did you love?
Must be for the girl next door.
I would just take it around.
Should I? Oh, you didn't
try it on, did you Beryl?
You did?
That's it. I need to hit to Bev.
She's my rock.
Hi Hun. You okay?
I dunno, Bev. I just lost focus.
You know, I got distracted.
Don't worry about it, Bear.
You just got to take
control. It's your life.
I mean, look at me, Bear.
Its real tough sometimes,
but I keep pushing.
Oh, sorry, hon. I got to take this.
Well, hi. Thank you
for getting back to me.
I hear you want to freeze your mother.
Would you like your mother?
We have an economy deal.
I'm sorry. Can you hold?
There, check me out for Christ sake?
Don't I look fabulous. I'm
sculpting myself my own body.
I'm an exhibit, right?
I'm a living gallery. My body is my art.
I gotta go hun, just go for it.
What are you waiting for?
Muah.
She's right though.
I just gotta go for it.
No more assin' about.
Iver.
How we doin' this,
Bear? Walking or running?
Dynamous night, velocity,
energy, speed, love.
I want speed.
Here we go.
Whoa, dear God.
No, we missed it again.
Oh, you're obsessed, c'mon.
I know! It's the movement in
between the moment of change.
I've gotta capture it.
I'm suffering for your art.
Its hyperfuturism, love.
Go for it. Now, come on.
I'm talking live
with Beryl Thomas, who's
latest exhibition of drawings
opens here tonight. Beryl.
Oh hello.
Can we start
by talking about what informs your work?
Well, I think it
was Du chon or Cage, maybe
who believed that one
should embark on a piece
without necessarily having a conception
of its eventual denouement.
It's the process involved
that's crucial to the journey
that you'll make, see?
Interesting.
It's like you're pushing the
female gaze here to extremes
and in the process, not
only objectifying men,
but actually deforming the
male body in a quite deliberate
almost vicious way.
No, no.
I completely lose sight of the male form.
Sex is not involved.
I'm just looking for what
Supreme moment of change.
The point of dynamic obstruction,
the images in between.
It's what I call hyperfuturism.
God, this vodka's good, innit?
I'm drinking from the
cup of creativity again.
I back on track.
Besotted with drawing.
It's all I want to do.
I think I'm quite good at it, you know,
in a Rousseau-esque sort of way.
Ive was my model.
I work him to the bone.
He is very tolerant, though.
Last week when I asked him to be a nude
descending a staircase, he said...
Who we referencing, Ber?
Do a show about your owny.
Art.
I'm obsessed.
I think I'm turning
into my sister, Beverly.
She never liked drawing or
playing with dolls like me.
She liked insects.
Wood lice and beetles.
She kept them all in a big fish bowl.
She'd wait until they packed out
and she'd put them in coffins
she'd made out of little raisin boxes.
Then she'd bury them in the garden.
After at while she'd dig them up
to see what had happened to them.
She was really obsessed.
Melvin lived next door.
And one day Bev borrowed
his favorite train set,
so that our pet mouse,
Peter, could ride in it.
She'd bride him with a
promise of sexual favors.
Bev forced the mouse to drive the train,
but she soon got bored with that.
So she put things on the
rails to cause derailments,
catastrophes, she called them.
She got more and more ruthless.
Finally, she tried to blow
up the little crossing
with a firework.
She hoped to bump off the mouse,
but the carpet caught fire
and the mouse turned brown, but survived.
Well later he did die of trauma.
She gave the mouse, the works.
A state funeral into the garden.
She played on
Dad's Dansette record player.
She made us all wear black.
I found these the other
day - my first drawings.
I used to draw all the
time. I just couldn't stop.
The walls of my bedroom
are completely covered with my drawings.
I dunno. It was just like a drug.
I used to get into trouble at school
for drawing all the time,
instead of doing proper work.
Once I got caught drawing
our teacher Ms. Maps.
In the nude. She knew it was her.
She recognized the hairs
poking through the holes in her stockings.
She just went quiet, like a mouse.
Oh yeah, Miss Maps.
Drawing's all I ever think about now.
I draw all the time,
but I still make things
for people too, but that last jumper
I knitted for Deedee's little girl where
It's lovely Beryl, It's really artistic.
Only I never saw her
actually wearin' it.
All I ever wanted to do
was to go to art school,
be creative, have a career.
But then I got pregnant with Colin.
Yeah, Colin, another
obsessive in the family.
One day when he was young,
he brought home this pigeon.
It couldn't fly, it had a broke wing.
He called it Percy.
Oh, Colin adored Percy.
They were inseparable.
He did everything for
him. It was a love affair.
He even hoisted him up on the clothesline,
So he could relate to other birds.
He built Percy a state
of the art pigeon coop.
It had everything. Mezzanine, floors,
Central heating run by a steam engine.
It was a palace in the garden.
In the house we had nothing,
no bathroom or nothing.
Colin worshiped Percy.
It ended in tragedy though.
He saw the culprit.
Colin vowed revenge.
The crossbow he made was precision built.
The arrows had Percy's feathers in them.
He practiced firing at particular
piece of wall and waited.
and waited.
Colin shot the cat.
It landed in the neighbors garden,
she was a cat fanatic.
She called the police.
They called it a crime of passion.
Colin got off with a caution.
He stayed totally obsessed
with precise, technical detail.
You know, things like
railway signaling systems.
His Yamaha organ.
Screw threads.
Well, TPI flag angles for metric UNC
and UNF screws at 30 degrees,
our total threat angle of 60 degrees.
And he taught himself to speak Dutch.
I can't believe he's 38
and still lives at home with us.
I wish I could have a bloody girlfriend
like a normal bloke.
Yeah. Obsession. The whole
family's obsessed or something.
Colin, Beverly, now me.
I blame our Grandma's
influence, she was obsessed too.
With pickling.
Gran preserved everything.
Pickled in big jars.
Cabbage, eggs, pigs
trotters, cows tongues,
lambs, chicks, nothing was safe from her.
Bev loved going to gram's house
just to stare at all the jars,
Wow.
especially the beetroot.
And sometimes she stole them.
I always knew because it left
crimson stains on her arms.
She wouldn't wash them for days.
She cried when the stains disappeared.
When grandma died,
the woman next door came in
and laid her out on the
table in the living room.
She put pennies on her eyes
and a bucket underneath the
table with holy water in it.
I saw Bev sneak in.
She stayed in there for hours.
Just staring and fiddling
with Gran's body.
She wasn't sad though.
When she came out, she said,
"I kicked the bucket."
Mom did think Bev was
a bit strange though.
Well we all did.
She was quite weird though.
Like when we went to the seaside,
she never wanted to play
on the beach with me.
She always went to the
carcus store to stare
at all the pickled
fish. She was entranced.
She saved up to buy a jar of jelly deans.
She never actually ate them though.
She just brought them out on
special occasions to look at.
I used to find decayin' food in her room.
Hidden in drawers.
When I asked her about it all she said was
There's bread in the British
museum that's 2000 years old.
Its fantastic Beryl.
She made a necklace out
of old, dried up carrots
with rhinestones stuck in them.
She wore it to her tenth birthday party.
With earrings made out of dead wasps.
I drew ponies in my scrapbook.
But Bev had folders of
mausoleums, mummies, and tombs.
Vladimir.
She told me she had
dreams of meeting Lenin
in this tomb in Moscow.
She idolized him.
Vladimir, Vladimir,
where are we going today?
Ah, Beverly, surely I was
dreaming I was in London
on Primrose Field eating ice cream.
Could we get a cone? And
have my favorite piroshki?
Of course, Beverly. We can
go there now. Take my hand.
Are we nearly there?
Course it is all fantasy,
but she was obsessed with him.
She even joined the young communist league
to get a free trip to
Moscow, to see his tour.
But the bus only went
as far as East Berlin.
So Bev quit the party in disgust.
That's the thing about Bev.
She always went for it.
Fanatical.
Do not yell, Colin.
This is a seminal piece.
My first dynamic self portrait.
I'm asserting my identity.
Making my physical mark.
It's a new dawn for me.
Like Bev had when she discovered Trigger.
Trigger Gets Stuffed in California.
Well, that was it, wasn't it?
Suddenly a whole new world
opened up before her eyes.
Bev stuffed everything after that.
She had a book of instructions.
She'd learned it all by heart.
When our dog Rudy died,
she stuffed him too.
Then she put Rudy on the mantelpiece.
Mum said, Oh thank God,
no more dogs doodoos.
When Bev was 18, she met this American GI.
Hi, I'm Lester. Can I
take your daughter out, sir?
Well that was it. She married him
and moved straight to
California. Didn't last though.
Bev spent more time at the
Trigger museum with her stuff.
Can you believe this?
Dad said,
I knew it. She's bloody trigger happy.
After Lester, Bev got to
a string of rich husbands
and got a pint of alimony.
She's had three boob
jobs, butt deductions,
lip collagen, and six face tucks.
And she spent a fortune fixing her teeth.
Don't I look fantastic?
Body sculpture. She calls it.
She started her first business in LA
stuffing pets for celebs.
Her latest gigs called
"Remains to be Seen."
High-tech cryogenics for her choose.
She's big time now.
And what have I done with my life?
I'm 59, married with a grownup geek,
still working in a factory
dreaming about what I should have done.
I could have gone to art school,
being somebody being a contender.
Now it's the bloody change, right?
I look like shit. I've lost
my looks, my figure's gone,
and to cap it all, the other night
I caught Iver watching one
of those twerking videos.
And you know what he said?
Come on and shake your
ass, shake your ass girl
Why don't you get one of
those butt lift things Beryl?
But to be absolutely honest,
I did secretly find off the internet.
But when I got it, well,
I spent about two bloody hours with it.
Whatever I did it wouldn't fit.
Oh, fuck it.
Why am I doing this
shit? Oh I hate myself.
To cap it all, later on,
Iver found it in the pocket on the sofa.
Oh what's this, open it
by mistake? Did you love?
Must be for the girl next door.
I would just take it around.
Should I? Oh, you didn't
try it on, did you Beryl?
You did?
That's it. I need to hit to Bev.
She's my rock.
Hi Hun. You okay?
I dunno, Bev. I just lost focus.
You know, I got distracted.
Don't worry about it, Bear.
You just got to take
control. It's your life.
I mean, look at me, Bear.
Its real tough sometimes,
but I keep pushing.
Oh, sorry, hon. I got to take this.
Well, hi. Thank you
for getting back to me.
I hear you want to freeze your mother.
Would you like your mother?
We have an economy deal.
I'm sorry. Can you hold?
There, check me out for Christ sake?
Don't I look fabulous. I'm
sculpting myself my own body.
I'm an exhibit, right?
I'm a living gallery. My body is my art.
I gotta go hun, just go for it.
What are you waiting for?
Muah.
She's right though.
I just gotta go for it.
No more assin' about.
Iver.
How we doin' this,
Bear? Walking or running?
Dynamous night, velocity,
energy, speed, love.
I want speed.
Here we go.
Whoa, dear God.
No, we missed it again.
Oh, you're obsessed, c'mon.
I know! It's the movement in
between the moment of change.
I've gotta capture it.
I'm suffering for your art.
Its hyperfuturism, love.
Go for it. Now, come on.
I'm talking live
with Beryl Thomas, who's
latest exhibition of drawings
opens here tonight. Beryl.
Oh hello.
Can we start
by talking about what informs your work?
Well, I think it
was Du chon or Cage, maybe
who believed that one
should embark on a piece
without necessarily having a conception
of its eventual denouement.
It's the process involved
that's crucial to the journey
that you'll make, see?
Interesting.
It's like you're pushing the
female gaze here to extremes
and in the process, not
only objectifying men,
but actually deforming the
male body in a quite deliberate
almost vicious way.
No, no.
I completely lose sight of the male form.
Sex is not involved.
I'm just looking for what
Supreme moment of change.
The point of dynamic obstruction,
the images in between.
It's what I call hyperfuturism.
God, this vodka's good, innit?