Ebbsfleet or bust

Dominic Savage had an early start. In Barry Lyndon (1975), Stanley Kubrick’s sprawling take on Thackeray, he played a prepubescent toff called Bullingdon blessed with a blond pudding-basin crop. By the time Savage started making his own films in the early Noughties, the hair had vanished, and so had any of Kubrick’s civilising varnish.

For television Savage made a loose trilogy of dramas which plummeted circle by circle into a pit of social deprivation. His subjects were teenage parenthood (Nice Girl), underage drug use and prostitution (When I Was 12), and suicide in a young offenders’ nick (Out of Control). These cheerless vignettes felt all the more raw because his untried young performers ad-libbed without a script. Later Savage trained his gaze on adult travails — the work/life/romance balance — and he employed known actors. But he stays loyal to the credo that dialogue made up on the spot strips away artifice and accesses emotional truth.

The Escape represents Savage’s escape from small screen to big screen. In another fresh move, he is working with a genuine film star in the form of Gemma Arterton. Arterton plays Tara, a commuter-belt housewife whose existential disquiet perhaps has something to do with the brute pleasurings her grunting husband Mark (Dominic Cooper) insists upon before breakfast. Then he drives off to work, leaving her to the hard yards with the squawking kids. It’s a dismal snapshot of autopilot motherhood, all supermarket trolleys and paralysing isolation. A weekend barbecue is a hollow charade. The garden in repose looks like the Alamo, a strafed rectangle of downed kiddies’ vehicles.

One day Tara nips up to town on the train and her eye is caught on the South Bank by a secondhand book about the ‘Lady and the Unicorn’ tapestries in Paris.