Flying Blind

For a city packed with film-makers, there seem to be surprisingly few films on commercial release that are set in Bristol. It does well on TV – Casualty, Skins, Mistresses, Being Human and Teachers are just a few of the programmes filmed here. But on the silver screen, Bristol is a rare sight. Especially films that are about the people who live here, that use its varied muddle of urban landscapes – films that engage fully with the city in the way that, say, Woody Allen does with New York or Paris. Of course, Bristol is not a capital, and perhaps none of the UK's other cities feature that often on film either. But Bristol is packed with great locations – from historic cobbled streets and winding hillside steps to striking industrial leftovers on the harbourside, from brightly coloured rows of houses and faded Georgian grandeur to bombed out ruins, from tower-block high pieces of street art to views out of the city to the Mendips.

Perhaps, then, that's why Flying Blind is proving so popular at the local Watershed cinema that they've extended its run. This film is Bristol born and bred, funded by the then Bristol-based iFeatures scheme run by Creative England. It tells the story of 40-something-year-old Frankie, an aerospace engineer who works on military drones at Filton. She begins a passionate affair with a 24-year-old French-Algerian student, Kahil – but suspicions about who he really is and what his motivations are soon creep in. Director Katarzyna Kilmkiewicz juxtaposes Frankie's Clifton Georgian flat, all high ceilings and sash windows, perched up on the edge of the Avon Gorge with Kahil's small room in a shared terrace house in Easton, overshadowed by the motorway flyover.

It's a promising plot. Its characters seemed plausible Bristolians; its setting in the world of engineering apt. Helen McCrory and Najib Oudghiri turn in strong performances, and there's plenty of Bristol scenery at which to raise a smile of recognition. But ultimately this film failed to take off: it lacked daring and depth, the conclusion managing the feat of being both inevitable and unclear.

Suspicion and intimacy are two of the main themes. Frankie and Kahil's fiery relationship soon becomes fraught when he's labelled a 'person of interest' by MI5, with possible terrorist links. Frankie begins to ask questions about his identity and motives: her heart trusts him but every time she lets her head follow, a new doubt arises. Her father and work colleagues start to interfere: these characters are used to represent the contemporary Western fear that terrorists live among us, and to highlight a seam of Islamophobia. What does Kahil really want from Frankie: is this a story of lust and love or of power and politics?

And Frankie may well wonder. She discovers Kahil's not really a student as he claimed, but a taxi driver. That his visa has run out and he's living in Bristol illegally. He looks at extremist websites - to keep up with the news, he claims. There are torture scars on his body. She finds guns in the bathroom of his shared house. Would, Frankie is asked, a 24-year-old really be interested in a woman of her age? In an outburst of anger, Kahil demands how Frankie can justify helping to create drones which will kill innocent civilians. 

Complex questions of morality and social responsibility lurk underneath the twists and turns of this thriller. But somehow the film just isn't up to addressing them. Kahil's behaviour, as we see it, would be enough to make anyone suspicious. His background has nothing to do with that. The audience is constantly and deliberately steered towards the conclusion that Kahil must be a terrorist, but at the same time we are berated for falling back on a stereotype based in fear, ignorance and a sense of guilt. The ending, too, reinforces the stereotype of the career woman who tries to have it all: fly too high, and your wings will be burned.