The story of "The Tolpuddle Martyrs". A group of 19th century English farm labourers who formed one of the first trade unions and started a campaign to receive fair wages.
WHAT I LIKED: As a descendant of the Tolpuddle Martyrs myself, I can't stress enough the importance of the story behind 'Comrades,' as it follows the first workers to form a union in the UK, and their prosecution for doing so. You at least get an opportunity to learn about that to some extent from this film, and any publicity for such a crucial part of our country's history deserves some brownie points at least.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: The sad thing is however that writer/director Bill Douglas utterly fluffs up the execution such that it becomes a boring, meandering, three-hour mess of a film which is ultimately a genuine struggle to sit through. Now it seems a shame to criticise such a well-intended picture so harshly, but what's astounding is just how aimless it really is.
On the one hand the story is just badly told. There's a notion at the beginning that the story will be told from an entertainer's perspective but that soon goes out the window, and then any scenes in which things actually happen in the narrative are glibly executed and use throwaway dialogue to explain away important points. The majority of the film's massive run-time is instead spent on what most filmmakers would recognise as world-building - footage in which characters go about their everyday lives so that we get to build a sense of what it's like. Here that mostly consists of the poor, downtrodden Dorset workers either working or engaging in some ancient forms of shared entertainment (singing, watching dancers or lanterners etc) and whilst the intention there was of course to build a tangible sense of community on screen, it's hard to argue that nearly three hours was needed of that - especially when the dialogue rams their situation down our throats so overtly in between.
Any one of those countless 'world-building' scenes could have been cut and not detracted from the film at all, and each equally outstays its welcome too as Douglas just fixes his camera at a relative distance and watches things unfold from afar - refusing to cut to close-up or even move to another aimless scene for a good five minutes each turn. That's even worse once the martyrs end up being transported to Australia after their prosecution (or at least I think that's what happened, it was all a little quick to tell), as the scenes even seem to have little connection to the story of the martyrs at all - one in which a dog gives a blowjob to a man overseeing the work of some random prisoners for example, or another where a prisoner casually expresses his feelings as a transvestite.
It's all a very bizarre direction to go down when bringing this great story to life, though it agreeably may not have been such a problem had Douglas actually spent some of his ridiculous run-time building a set of engaging characters in the martyrs. Alas, only George Loveless (Robin Soans) receives even a smattering of such treatment, and that means that there's nothing to even really engage with at all.
As a result of all that meandering world-building with little to keep you engaged, you'll be left watching from a distance, feeling your limbs go numb and your ears occasionally bleed from hearing the strange, catastrophic attempt at a score that backs many of those bizarre, over-indulgent scenes.
VERDICT: A terrible execution of a hugely important story, Bill Douglas' 'Comrades,' spends its entire time badly portraying the world of its characters without properly developing them or their story.
