Catherine Tate is a smart, profane British comic whose performances have attracted a loyal following. Perhaps a yearning not to be stereotyped as a funny yobette enticed her into this low-budget comedy, set in the 1960s, in which she plays a Yorkshire housewife dragged off by her rabidly socialist husband (Iain Glen) to a new life in Soviet East Germany. The consequences are predictable.
Fleeing the advances of consumerism - in the form of rock music, sexual profligacy, and the apotheosis of greed - the Ratcliffes represent the last vestiges of the good, decent folk George Orwell admired (before he was shocked into reality by the treacheries of the Spanish Civil War) and are oblivious to their entrapment.
Their children (Brittany Ashworth and Jessica Barden) are sucked along in an absurd quest for social perfection. Yet their desired paradise on earth - until the fall of the Berlin Wall - was one of the most repulsive communist statelets ever spawned by Stalinism.
The Stasi - the "democratic republic's" secret police - spied on 6m people, enlisting 400 000 agents through coercion and blackmail to report on their relatives, lovers, and neighbours. When the files were finally opened, everyone discovered the full horror of a surveillance machine based on utter paranoia. The system has been best exposed in the brilliant The Lives of Others (2006).
Mrs Ratcliffe's Revolution - contrary to the initial cheeriness of the deluded family - falters, if not fails, in its breezy version of hope betrayed by horror and conformity. In Orwell's unmatched Nineteen Eighty-Four a pompous apparatchik proudly boasts to the antihero that his son has become a junior informer, a process that later reaches its apotheosis when the little sneak denounces him and he is shot.
Elements of this dystopian vision enter into the disillusion and downfall of the Ratcliffes. One daughter goes around taking notes on them all; Iain Glen is compromised by a Stasi honeytrap (Heike Makatsch); and corruption is universal.
It's difficult not to believe that the film-makers seized on a good idea (nostalgia for the tacky, sinister Soviet empire) and ran with it until it ran out of steam. The early comedy - at which Tate is exceptionally good - cannot be sustained in the East German setting, here shown as Nazi fascism in a claustrophobic, decaying morass of incompetence and evil.
The narrative wanders, as if seeking a way out - which is what Mrs Ratcliffe engineers, transforming from a lacklustre, crushed wife to an inventive, courageous woman determined to get back home to The Beatles, Cream, and Carnaby Street. Tate rescues the film from the family's inevitable disillusion, though her emergence as a star owes rather too much to the script's suppression of the nastier elements of the Stasi and the defeated people over which it presides.
Orwell also described the debasement of language implicit in total social control: "Don't you see that the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it..."
It is precisely against the narrowing of thought (and behaviour) that Mrs Ratcliffe rebels. She sees it defiling her family. Had this theme been further explored, the film would have been crueller, bleaker - yet not unfaithful to its comic roots. Evidence is now emerging of thousands of families who did precisely what the Ratcliffes attempted - repudiated the West and trekked to their doom.
While Tate successfully rallies her family's spirits and literally soars away with them to at least a version of freedom, many were not so fortunate. Since Mrs Ratcliffe's Revolution is "based on a true story", it could have been bolder in its detail. A tendency to frivolity emasculates its warning tone.
Ranking the Analysts 2009
Directed by Bille Eltringham
