THE film The Ceremony (Cert. 15) bears more than a passing resemblance to the enduring and powerful Antigone story from ancient Greece. This has continued to inspire dozens of authors, playwrights, artists, composers, and filmmakers, as it has the debut director Jack King, who has chosen his native Bradford as the setting.
Antigone, particularly in the version by Sophocles, is repeatedly thwarted in attempting to give her brother a decent burial. In her place, King presents us with a couple of undocumented migrants, Yusuf (Tudor Cucu-Dumitrescu), a middle-aged Kurd and a younger Romanian, Cristi (Erdal Yildiz). They work under harsh conditions at a car wash.
Squabbles frequently break out among the crew, culminating in the theft of a customer’s Rolex watch. One worker, Nassar (Mo’min Swaitat), gets blamed, sacked, and ejected from the team’s living quarters. Soon afterwards, Yusuf and Cristi discover the distressed man’s body. They have a dilemma: if they contact the police, this will jeopardise both the business and their means of making a living. With heavy hearts and mixed motives, they decide to drive with the corpse into the Yorkshire Dales. It is bleak midwinter, and the earth that they dig into is iron-hard.
Cristi is interested only in disposing of the body swiftly. Yusuf is determined that Nassar should have a rightful Islamic burial. Cristi, using his Christian upbringing as justification, argues “You cannot bury the man who took his own life.” Yusuf has other ideas. They are poles apart, and yet, in the process of the film, they come to understand each other better. Both are victims of the cruelties that they have endured in their own countries and now in Britain. That much is obvious.
The Ceremony, however, mines a rich seam in exploring how intricate are what makes us the people we are and what dehumanises us. There is in Yusuf a sense of divine imperative to care for Nassar in death as in life. It would be only too tempting for “expendable” migrants to ditch spiritual values in favour of self-preservation.
Through what is in effect a dark night of the soul, Cristi re-acquaints himself with those Romanian traditions that emphasise the importance of hospitality. In sharing a meal with Yusuf he explains how offering bread (symbolising life) and salt (known as “mother of God”) is a sign of love. All this occurs in desolate moorland that is as unyielding an environment as their daily experience of unremitting hardship. Significantly, Robbie Bryant has shot the film in stunning black and white as if to acknowledge that there are absolutes that we trample down at our peril.
Somehow, in digging a grave, the men dig up beliefs previously instilled in them. Antigone’s name means “worthy of one’s parents” and what they stood for. She sets about doing the right thing, no matter how adverse the consequences may be for her. As with her, so with this odd couple, those latent beliefs imparted by forebears win out. King’s film is asking us whether we, the audience, need the assistance of faith to unite and guide us, and suggesting that, without it, core values rapidly decay.
