DVD/Blu-ray: Peter Rabbit
Frenetic Beatrix Potter update gives us a leporine the author could never have imagined
That this Peter Rabbit took more money in the UK than Disney's sublime Coco is a tad depressing. I know I’m no longer a member of the film’s target demographic, but I can imagine many under-tens being underwhelmed by Will Gluck’s family comedy.
The Receptionist – London’s underground sex industry laid bare
An incredibly effective and affecting story on life in a brothel
When director Jenny Lu graduated from university, the promise of a big city career quickly turned into a series of rejections. Around this time, a close friend of hers committed suicide by jumping off a bridge – unbeknownst to their circle of friends, this girl was working in the sex industry.
DVD: New Town Utopia
Off-beat celebration of post-war British town planning
You come to Christopher Ian Smith’s New Town Utopia expecting a damning indictment of post-war British planning. But while there are melancholy moments, this is mostly an upbeat documentary. Smith manages, without the use of CGI, to make the much-maligned Essex new town of Basildon look uncommonly attractive. The spiritual home of Essex man, this solidly Conservative town isn’t what you’d expect.
DVD/Blu-ray: Woodfall - A Revolution in British Cinema
Pin Cushion review - a twisted fable of daydreams and bullies
Childlike fantasies and quirky visuals mask a dark heart in creative Brit flick
On the surface, Pin Cushion is a whimsical British indie, packed with imagination and charm. But debuting director Deborah Haywood builds this on a foundation of bullying and prejudice, creating a surprisingly bleak yet effective film.
Swimming with Men review - Rob Brydon and co sink
Midlife crisis synchro comedy forgets to include laughs
Swimming with Men is a British comedy which must have looked like a dead cert when it was pitched. “A bunch of middle-aged male losers do synchronised swimming. They have a bossy female coach who persuades them to go to the world championships. How funny (and moving) is that? The tears will flow. The jokes will write themselves!” Unfortunately the jokes did not write themselves, and no one else got round to writing them either.
The Happy Prince review - Wilde at heart
Rupert Everett's spirited and humane homage to Oscar is worth the long wait
Oscar Wilde did not have a dignified departure. As soon as he died, his body began to emit a river of fluids from various orifices. At the graveside in Père Lachaise there were unseemly scenes which no witness was indiscreet enough to describe, but probably they involved theatrics from Bosie. Wilde, using Canon Chasuble as a mouthpiece, had once joked about choosing to be interred in Paris: “I fear that hardly points to any very serious state of mind at the last.”
Rupert Everett’s The Happy Prince ponders that throwaway gag from a variety of angles. Despite his desperate plight, Everett’s Oscar is far from serious. In the brief years of his exile, we see him sing a bawdy gay song at the top of his voice in a French drinking den, dine with a rowdy coterie of Gallic poets (pictured below), and cavort with naked young Neapolitans in an all-male enactment of Salome. Anyone expecting this biopic to be an unremitting tale of misery and humiliation should prepare for a joyous surprise.
Wilde was released from Reading Gaol in 1897 and immediately fled across the Channel, where there was still no escape from Anglo-Saxon opprobrium. Near the start, a well-to-do woman (a cameo for Anna Chancellor) recognises him in a street in northern France but is forbidden from expressing sympathy by her husband. They both roared in the stalls before the playwright’s downfall, but the English have their standards. Oscar’s strength and saviour are Reggie Turner (Colin Firth) and Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas) whose love and tolerance is unstinting. But they urge him to stick to the terms of his agreement with his wife Constance (Emily Watson): in order to keep receiving his allowance, he must avoid contact with Lord Alfred Douglas (Colin Morgan).
Bosie was the cause of all the trouble in the first place. An opening caption reminds us that Wilde’s legal travails were triggered when the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, Lord Alfred’s father, left a card for Wilde accusing him of “posing as a somdomite”. (For clarity, Everett corrects his Lordship’s typo.) Naturally they are unable to stay apart, and set up house in Naples where Vesuvius glowers symbolically on the horizon.
The Happy Prince is the long-cherished dream of Rupert Everett, who played Wilde in David Hare’s The Judas Kiss, which is set on the night in 1895 when the playwright refused to do a midnight flit as law closed in. A sprightly Imagine documentary, Rupert Everett - Born to Be Wilde (available until 5 July on iPlayer), tells the story of the film’s long, agonising gestation. Was it worth rolling the rock up the hill?
Everett directs himself in his own script and somehow manages not to look overburdened by the immense responsibility. Much prettier than Oscar, he has elongated his jawline to mimic the long face, and the look can be a distraction. But he embraces Wilde’s headlong descent into isolation and penury with a reckless joie de vivre. “I’ve nothing in me, not even fear,” he says after facing down a pack of goading toffs. One awful scene, on the platform of Clapham Junction, embodies all of Wilde’s tragedy, but gives rise to a wonderful climactic joke.
His performance is richer and deeper than Stephen Fry’s, who starred in the last major biopic. Colin Morgan has a harder task erasing the memory of the young Jude Law, who was born to embody Bosie’s superficial beauty. In pretty blond tresses, he captures the shameless petulance, self-regard and cruelty of an angelic devil. Watson (pictured above) is dignified as Constance, racked with back pain and torn between love and rage. There’s a wry comic turn from Tom Wilkinson as an Irish padre, and a juicy one from Béatrice Dalle as a low-life chatelaine.
The eponymous ur-text provides Everett with the framework. In happier times he recites his heartrending fairytale to his two young sons as a bedtime story, and it comes to stand for the odyssey of Wilde himself. The other more overt accounts of his ordeal – De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol – are mentioned only in dispatches, while the script quotes liberally from Wilde’s bon mots. “'Like dear St Francis I am wedded to poverty,' he says at one point, 'but in my case the marriage is not a success.'”
Wilde’s quietus, peopled by bizarre hallucinations, is not quite as tear-jerking as the story of the statue and the sparrow. Nor, blessedly, is it as disgusting as the real death. Handsomely shot by John Conroy, this is a spirited and humane homage from an actor who knows and understands his subject inside out.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Happy Prince
Edie review - Sheila Hancock gets summit fever
Octogenarian widow aims to conquer a Scottish mountain
There have been plenty of films about mountains, and they are mainly about men. The plot tends not to vary: man clambers up peak because, as Mallory famously reasoned, it is there. Whether factual or scripted, often they are disaster movies too: Everest, Touching the Void, the astonishing German film about the race to conquer the vertical wall of the Eiger, North Face.
On Chesil Beach review - perfect playing in a poignant Ian McEwan adaptation
Never such innocence again: Saoirse Ronan excels in a film of very British reserve
Ian McEwan has said that he decided to adapt his 2007 novel On Chesil Beach for the screen himself at least partly because he did not want anyone else to do so (with earlier works, including Atonement, he was glad not to have taken on the adaptation). The sensitivity of the original lies in its interiority, a quality that moves medium with far more difficulty than most. It’s a moot point whether the challenge could have finally been met by anyone, but somehow Dominic Cooke’s film, his screen debut, never quite attains the perfect, lonely poignancy of the book.
That said, Cooke has made a film of quiet quality, his most emphatic achievement to draw such high-calibre performances from his two principals, Florence Ponting (Saoirse Ronan) and Edward Mayhew (Billy Howle). Elaborating their story feels somehow redundant: On Chesil Beach is surely one of those films which most viewers approach knowing at least the outline of the story. It seems equally extraneous to note that the ill-fated wedding night of these lovers is set in 1962, so ubiquitous have been the accompanying references to Philip Larkin (his Annus Mirabilis in particular, with its references to the following year, “Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban/And the Beatles’ first LP”).
The social details are so expertly captured that they seem practically carbon-dated
It’s very much to Cooke’s credit, too, that he has brought no cheap embellishment to a stark story in the way that Hollywood might have done (the screen rights were first with Ang Lee, apparently). The back-and-forth between the couple’s in-the-moment honeymoon unease and their earlier acquaintance and courtship is subtle, as is the way in which character is defined by music – Edward’s jazz set against classical for Florence (the gradations of the latter, from the optimistic expanses of Mozart to the tempests of Beethoven, are nicely caught). (Pictured below: Billy Howle, Saoirse Ronan)
So too their respective family worlds. There’s the contrast between the freedom, the lack of order at the country cottage that is Edward’s home (it's located in some generic English screen-idyll village), and the sterner, harshly defined setting of Florence’s Oxford. It certainly pays, adaptation-wise, to add full visual context for the accident that defines Edward’s mother (Anne Marie-Duff, never overplaying but always poignant). The embellishments chez Ponting are more subtle, though that’s hardly the first word that comes to mind for Emily Watson’s image-breaking performance as Florence’s mother. (One does wonder how the Ponting household, where Iris Murdoch – once famously defined into her bonking and bonkers periods – seems to be on speed dial, has so disregarded sex, including education in aforesaid.)
It leaves the trimly-moustached Samuel West, playing Geoffrey Ponting, whose very name seems to have a brisk home-counties efficiency to it, as the dark force of the piece. McEwan’s adaptation underplays his book’s more emphatic hint at abuse, leaving us with just a moment’s ambiguous eye contact between father and daughter across the deck of the family yacht. But the scene in which West, after soundly defeating Edward at tennis before then realising that Florence has been watching, positively explodes, signals with semaphoric clarity that something is very wrong in this family world.
On Chesil Beach, book and film alike, leaves us to ponder the circumstances that brought these protagonists to such a seismic coincidence of anger and fear, one that will annihilate their youth and hope. For these are two lovers who cannot step out of themselves, out of their time, the social details of which are so expertly captured by Cooke and his design collaborators that they seem practically carbon-dated.
Was McEwan consciously aware, writing his story, of another literary honeymoon, another beach, another century, a different poet – “Ah, love, let us be true/To one another! for the world, which seems/To lie before us like a land of dreams…” – and the possibility of a different conclusion to marital desolation? The inability to act – to turn back, to reconcile – is as tragic as action blundered, but it’s not quite tragedy that defines McEwan’s conclusion, rather acute poignancy (another speciality of Larkin). Perhaps the sole false note of Cooke’s film comes in its final scene, one that channels emotion in the most familiar cinematic terms. Until then, On Chesil Beach has been a film of close sensitivity, in which Saoirse Ronan – musician that she is – plays never less than exquisitely.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for On Chesil Beach