Never Stop the Action, written and directed by Paul Rowley
A film review by Dan Boyle
A supernova in a New York City subway carriage, NEVER STOP THE ACTION is a kaleidoscopic journey…
Never stop the action is a film that has a curiously dated quality. It’s as if filmmaker, Paul Rowley conceived the film back in the dance crazed 90’s but has just got around to filming it. This sort of delay is not unusual. Two friends, Teshi and Casey reconnect at a dance party after a time apart. Teshi (Ricki Lynée) is a vibrant black woman and Casey (Stephen Quinn) is the requisite Irish component in an IFF film set mainly in the New York subway. Casey is a bog standard flamboyant gay man who has flocked to NY for the usual Irish reasons. He has found himself in the NY gay milieu. Reunited, Teshi takes him on a sentimental journey to the Coney Island amusement park, a gay Mecca, and the place where fun goes to die.
Still high and internally pulsating from the dance party the two besties cavort and reminisce on the D-train all the way from the Bronx to Coney Island. Typically, in film, a train journey becomes a metaphor for life, history and the passage of time. The two discuss Einstein’s train experiment and his ideas about the universe. Singularities and being single. Quickly the film becomes disparate, into a series of homages to classic new wave cinema and music video culture of decades past. From the breathless frivolity of Jean Luc Goddard to the odd encounters with ‘truthed up’ oddballs á la Jim Jarmusch’s latter new wave films. The film’s digressions harken back to this earlier era. A sense of the current USA’s reeling from the ongoing onslaught of the Trump administration against Black LBQT Latino communities and other minorities is completely ignored.
Director, Paul Rowley has cleverly crafted his film. He displays a masterly cinematic technique. He even makes a François Truffaut like appearance as an interviewer in a cinema vérité section about the killing of suspected IRA terrorists in Gibraltar in 1988. There is another section about the Moonies cult of the 70’s. Why? What is the relevance to contemporary USA? The film takes a darker mood. The soundtrack echoes the alienation of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Teshi shares a childhood memory of a neighbourhood shooting of a young black man by police. Casey recalls the death of a gay friend who died of cancer. AIDS is conspicuous by its absence. I would suggest Never stop the action has more to say about film culture than the lives of its two protagonists. A new wave film maker’s credo. Never stop the action. Never yell cut! The camera eye reveals all truth!
Films should matter. In 2025, the orange tide that sinks all hope should be resisted. This film leaves Teshi and Casey washed up on the beach at Coney Island. They disappear like memories. A forgotten pair of red shoes camply mark their journey through this life.
Stills courtesy of the Irish Film Festival
Daniel Boyle is a Melbourne actor/performer/ director who has done everything from Shakespeare to the Broadway musical.
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