Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Three Businessmen
(1998) offer a welcome
respite. Mostly composed of sequence shots -
long, continuous takes, which often feature the
actors moving through, and interrelating with,
largely empty cityscapes - the fi lm can perhaps
best be described as a surreal urban travelogue: a
journey or odyssey that takes many unexpected
(and sometimes unnoticed) twists and turns as
the characters traverse a Borgesian global land-
scape governed by few, if any of the rational,
Euclidean properties of vernacular urban space.
By way of brief synopsis, the plot centres
for almost the entirety of the fi lm on the urban
adventures of two businessmen, Benny, a gar-
rulous American (played by Miguel Sandoval)
and his coy, initially reluctant interlocutor, Frank
(played by Cox himself). Both are art dealers visit-
ing Liverpool. They meet in the city's legendary
Adelphi Hotel where an unsuccessful attempt to
secure a meal in the vast and deserted hotel dining
room precipitates their downtown quest in search
of a restaurant. Scripted by Cox's partner Tod
Davies, the fi lm is in no small part inspired by the
Spanish director Luis Buñuel's surrealist classic
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
(1972).
10
Like the characters in Buñuel's fi lm, Frank and
Benny's attempts to dine are continually
thwarted, although, unlike the Buñuelean tale,
these are for a variety of mostly banal reasons.
The Liverpool sequences of the fi lm (geo-
graphically at least, in diegetic terms they never
actually leave the place they call 'Liverpool')
provide the stage for some comic and philosoph-
ical musings on the history and geography of the
city, with the British character Frank acting as
both foil and tourist guide to the unremittingly
inquisitive Benny. Topics range from Liverpool's
involvement in the slave trade, the Beatles, the
signifi cance of Carl Jung's statue in Mathew Street,
and speculations, based around their under-
standings of the social demography of the city,
as to the likely clientele of a Mercedes car deal-
ership they pass (they settle on drug dealers).
A series of mysterious fl yers bearing the
name and image of someone called 'Daddy Z'
connect the different areas of the city through
which they pass, unwittingly en route to what is
later revealed to be a place of pilgrimage (where,
moreover, they fi nally get to eat). Now joined by
a third businessman, Leroy (Robert Wisdom),
who has lost his way somewhere in Chicago, the
travellers' quest ends in a desert (somewhere off
Mathew Street), in actuality one of the Spanish
locations used in Sergio Leone's iconic spaghetti
westerns. Their hunger fi nally appeased, the three
businessmen (or Three Kings as we now under-
stand them to be) seem to fi nd their bearings once
more. The fi lm ends with a sense of the miracu-
lous: a psychic deliverance from the mundane
and homogenized world from which they have
stumbled. As Frank and Benny head off in the
direction of Mathew Street, however, it is unclear
to what extent their journey might have shaken
them out of their somnambulance and disconnec-
tion from the global corporate-scapes (Appadurai,
1996) they seem forever destined to wander.
Described by one critic as a 'corporate road
movie' (Davies, 2000, p. 170),
Three Business-
men
is in many respects the cinematic antidote to
the 'idea' of Liverpool on offer in
Liverpool:
World in One City
. As I have already alluded, in
terms of their formal composition one of the more
striking differences between the two fi lms lies in
the radically divergent nature of their editing. The
525+ edits that comprise the 8-min marketing
fi lm establishes a pace that makes the 120-shot,
83-min
Three Businessmen
seem positively gla-
cial in comparison. Yet although they both 'map'
ostensibly the same city, the stylistic adherence to
the sequence shot or long take in Cox's fi lm allows
the viewer to dwell in representational spaces,
which, privileging spatial contiguity and the unin-
terrupted unfolding of real time, allow closer
engagement with the
materiality
of the urban
landscape, and, by extension, the
situatedness
of
human actors within this landscape. This is not to
say that Cox's Liverpool is any less constructed,
any less a cinematic assemblage of images and
sounds. The essential 'messiness' (Till, 2009) of
lived space necessitates a certain creative order-
ing (not to mention contractual and logistical
compliance) when it comes to location fi lming in
cities. In the case of
Three Businessmen
, this
ordering appears principally geared towards the
exclusion of people and traffi c. In keeping with
the alienating urban geographies portrayed in
the fi lm, the city is mostly depopulated, its empty
spaces heightening the sense of solipsistic
10
Cox and Davies' production company is called Exterminating Angel, in homage to Buñuel's 1962 fi lm of the
same name.
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