Charlie Russell's documentary on one year in the life of the writer Beryl Bainbridge begins with a birthday party scene; its power lies in the audience's uncertainty as to whether it will end with another birthday or a funeral. With nine family relatives apparently all dying at the age of 71 Bainbridge was understandably nervous about her chances of lasting until 72, rather less predictably she agreed to allow Russell unfettered access to follow her as she reflects on her life.
Russell's film Beryl's Last Year is a revealing, often painfully so, portrait of the five times Booker-nominated author, a woman who in Russell's unsparing words "smokes too much, drinks too much and has written a book in years". Securing access to Bainbridge did not pose a great hurdle to Russell: she is his grandmother.
Talking on the Guardian Haycast Bainbridge said that she agreed to make the film because it was her grandson behind the camera and while the film is undoubtably a powerful and gripping work Russell told me that the genesis of the film was as a series of interviews with his grandmother, an attempt for a grandson to understand his famous grandmother, to bring the past to life in the knowledge that life is finite. It was only later that these interviews were, with the support of the BBC, shaped into a film.
The filmmaker, who is 26, claims that Bainbridge never actually believed she would die at 71 but this seems disingenous- it is the grim reaper who provides the narrative drive to the entire film. With death on her mind Bainbridge returns to her past, the men who rejected her, the Liverpool of her childhood as well as her writings which so often were rooted in reality.
Some writers wish to maintain a level of mystery about the origins of their stories but Bainbridge seems content to lift the curtain on her fiction and reveal how often it was built on facts. What one leaves and keeps are questions that concern all filmmakers but when you are constructing a portrait of someone in your family these tensions are surely heightened.
It is to Russell's credit that his portrait of Bainbridge is deeply affectionate, even when she is falling down drunk at a book event, or coughing painfully in her bed the camera does not feel exploitative. By the end of the film Bainbridge, having reached 72, discovers something about her parents which sheds new light on her fear of 71. The writers block that has plagued her shows signs of lifting and she appears enthused again about her work. The lesson of Beryl's Last Year is that the most effective way to conquer the fear of death is to embrace living.
