Andrew Worsdale Movies of the week
I don’t have any friends I still know from my schooldays. It’s probably just as well. Most of them weren’t really friends because I was such a wise-ass. But two films opening this week give unique insight into the world of children and growing up. Both are rites- of-passage stories and tales of bonding between chums and their struggles to become adult or deal with an adult world. Both are British, but despite their similarities in dealing with the struggle of youth they couldn’t be more different.
Metroland, adapted by Adrian Hodges from Julian Barnes’s 1980 debut novel, is about two school-friends edging into adulthood in London’s commuter suburbia at the end of the Metropolitan line – hence the title. Set mainly in 1977, the narrative centres on a young married couple, Chris (Christian Bale) and Marion (the ever-luminous Emily Watson, who really should have won the Oscar for Lars von Trier’s mesmerising Breaking the Waves). They’ve set up house and started a family but their cosy suburban life is disrupted when an old boyhood mate, a perfectly obnoxious Lee Ross, returns and openly takes his buddy to task for his middle-class complacency, mortgage and nine-to-five job.
What makes matters worse is that the marriage is losing its sparkle, lapsing into sexual routine. These crises make him reminisce about the time he spent as a bohemian photographer in Paris in the late 1960s and his affair with the sexually voracious Annick, played by the luscious Elsa Zylberstein (who also starred in last year’s Farinelli.)
Chris’s memories cause him to be pulled into the present – a world of wild parties and the beginnings of punk subculture. It’s a witty and moving picture, and director Philip Saville creates a real sense of time and place. The London scenes are all shot in high- contrast blues and blacks and the beatnik French flashback scenes are in softer brown hues. Saville says: “The dictum `You become what you resist’ came to mind as I was preparing production. We are hostile to our parents when we are young and then find in later life that we gradually become like them. That’s difficult to come to terms with. This premise permeates the film.” Saville does a great job in not moralising about the characters’ excesses. It’s up to the viewer to make a judgment and most of us have been there. (I sowed my wild oats but nowadays I share my bedroom with my better half and our 18-month-old creation. Jeez, I can even change nappies.)
This is the kind of movie that would sit very nicely on television, in a late-night slot because of the sex scenes. But the strength of the performances – especially by Watson, who effortlessly conveys an amused pragmatism and intelligence – and the sharp and witty dialogue make this more than just small-screen fare.
More ambitious and probably shot on a bigger budget, because of extravagant period styling matched up with state-of- the-art optical effects, is Fairy Tale: A True Story. It’s a delicate look at imagination and the power of belief. Based on actual incidents that took place in rural Yorkshire in 1917, the film is about two young girls who took photographs that seemed to capture a group of fairies in their garden. (It has the same plot-line as Photographing Fairies, which is also now on screen.)
The photographs were challenged, mocked by the press but defended by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who wrote a book called The Coming of the Fairies). They were treated with scepticism but charmed acceptance by escape artist Harry Houdini. The fact that the events happened during World War I has led academics to believe that it was the horrors of armed conflict that made the girls long for some form of hope and grace. This is nicely underscored in the movie by director Charles Sturridge when the two youngsters encounter the walking wounded at a train station.
The film’s real luminosity comes from the spirited performances by Elizabeth Earl and Florence Hoath as the youngsters and Harvey Keitel’s tongue- in-cheek playing of Houdini. He obviously relishes not having to resort to Italian-American bad-guy mode. On the minus side Peter O’Toole as Conan Doyle looks a shadow of his former self though still manages to infuse the part with some degree of his usual bombastic enthusiasm. The special effects are also too modern. The fairies look too obviously like digital creations, all streamlined and CD-ROM-ish. The goblins in Photographing Fairies are altogether more believable. But that film is more about an adult’s journey into the world of make-believe. Fairy Tale: A True Story is a family movie that doesn’t condescend to kids. Family values seem to be taking a new turn as some form of intelligent and entertaining investigation of the household takes place on the big screen.