That film's brittle textures and haunted ambiance seemed in some strange way to have sprung organically from the nation in which it was set.
There are two important implications for Boyle's philosophy of experiment that derive from the natural historical context in which it was set.
The name of a sail is frequently derived from the name of the piece of rigging on which it is set or from its location with reference to a nearby piece of gear.
Spun from the most gossamer-thin of ideas – a sketch really, stretched out to feature length – the film is as airy as they come, propelled along by a plot seemingly plucked from the 1920s in which it is set.
But it does something they don't: reproduces the tones and moods of grand melodrama from the time in which it's set, London, 1950, and features one of the great flashbacks — to wartime, with a Davies standby, the group sing, raised to a new level of historical consciousness.
The same tradition of thought refuses to divorce happiness from the material circumstances in which it is set.
It borrows styles and routines from the vaudeville era in which it is set (the nineteen-twenties --here nineteen-twenties --herethere a little Eddie Canineteen-twenties --hereHelenineteen-twenties --hererom the flies.
Its title, Montague Terrace, comes from the block of flats in which it's set, a decaying art deco ocean liner of a building that made me think of Marine Court in Hastings, where Iain Sinclair, psychogeographer extraordinaire, maintains a weekend home – rather fitting, given that most of its characters could have walked straight out of the pages of one of his more capacious books.
Early on, the film seems to be shaping up as a modern-day equivalent to one of those swirling Douglas Sirk melodramas from the 1950s (the era in which it is set), featuring long-suffering but defiant heroines in states of extreme emotional turmoil.
A swab taken from the squalid Salford boarding house in which it is set might reveal DNA samples for every episode of Coronation Street, the complete works of Jim Cartwright and the musical identity of Morrissey.
