Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.What do you see when you look at an image of baked beans in a Styrofoam box, the colours so bright you wince? Or, indeed, people in tight swimwear at the English seaside, accompanied by any combination of prams, pigeons, sausages, ice cream vans, cups of tea and lipstick-stained teeth? For UK readers at least, what all this may instantly call to mind is the subject of new documentary I Am Martin Parr: the photographer whose portraits of a certain sort of British leisure time have made him a brand name.For fans, much of the appeal will be seeing the man in action, stalking the promenade in New Brighton, Merseyside, the setting for his 1986 breakthrough collection, The Last Resort. (Actual biography is limited, though it stays with you that Parr grew up the son of birdwatchers.) Effort goes into persuading a café waitress not to grin for the camera. The result is a pose in front of a sign for “Our Famous Frothy Coffee”, small flags of St George painted on each cheek, and a straight face on the brink of helpless laughter.Director Lee Shulman often seems every bit as tickled. But like Parr, this slim, seemingly jolly film is actually more inscrutable. It is hard to know, for instance, if an unspoken comment might lie in the most robust analysis of this definitive British voice coming from French curators. (For native opinion we get, inevitably, Grayson Perry.) And silence surrounds the question of whether Parr-Land — with its unchanging Union Jacks and particular vision of working-class life — might look any different this side of Brexit.A light touch is also applied to the eternal puzzle of whether Parr is laughing at or with his subjects. (Why would it spoil the effect if that waitress had smiled for the camera?) Mostly, you need to bring your own angle, which you can take as the film being evasive, or reflecting how all art should probably be treated. The film shrugs and smiles. Parr too. “People are funny,” he says, vanishing back behind the camera.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from February 21
