‘Bill Douglas: My Best Friend’ Review: Affecting Portrait Of A Maverick Director Who Died Too Young
deadline.comThe recent passing of Terence Davies and the tributes that followed — tales of a steel will, impassioned budgetary battles and a host of dream projects that never materialized — give this highly personal tribute to Scottish filmmaker Bill Douglas an extra and very poignant relevance as a similar story, now depressingly familiar to the British film industry, of an uncompromising talent who left us with a tantalizing promise of what might have been.
Now largely unknown to the wider world, but very dear to the heart of Scotland (despite the fact that he left his homeland at the earliest opportunity), Douglas is the closest thing to a Rosetta Stone in recent British independent and social-realist cinema.
From his early home movies through to his last three-hour masterwork Comrades (1986), the director left an indelible imprint that still seems shockingly modern today, leaving traces in everything from Derek Jarman’s early Super-8 works to Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and beyond.
Jack Archer’s film begins a little scrappily, introducing Peter Jewell as Douglas’s longtime best friend since childhood. This friendship will prove to be both intense and enigmatic (Jewell insists it was platonic), since the film doesn’t really dive into Douglas’s ensuing reputation as a pioneer of gay cinema.
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