Little of merit in Curtis’ Joy Division
LOVE ACTUALLY
A North London Odeon
Piss-wet, late-November Sunday afternoon
Playful caricatures, Christmas London milieu. No, not a dramatisation of Dickens, but Richard Curtis’ directorial debut, in which a cast of well-known Brits act out several sometimes-connected tableaux on L.O.V.E as Bill Nighy’s ageing rock star slags off his remake of ‘Love Is All Around’ on its way to the Noel no. 1. Neeson is single stepdad. Rickman menopausal boss and hubby to Thompson’s Hampstead wife. McCutcheon accessible but vulnerable cockney. Freeman his ‘Office’ character. Him out of ‘My Family’ wacky twat. There are half-clever visual, aural or narratival segueways to not make the idea seem too threadbare. And some nice Thames-side cityscapes.
The film’s fantastical conceit – that love will conquer all – goes too far when Curtis has Grant’s bumbling post-Blairite PM (a smile and a mendacious soundbite all you need to woo the bewildered hordes) actually standing up to the latest Bilderberg freak of a US president. When your actual PM has just spent a week doing his usual non-confrontational genuflection to the Administration Which Is Always Right, that sticks in the craw.
Then many of the characters converge at the school Christmas panto in Wandsworth, south London. Talented or useless, rich or poor, black or white; it didn’t matter. Yet another knobber peddling the myth of Multicultural Great Britain.
The film ends with the characters kissing their loved ones at Heathrow Arrivals and then it’s back to the normal people of the first few frames doing likewise, before they all merge into one another as the multiscreens decrease in size. Just like a Benetton ad.
Nothing wrong with forging a recognisable context for the film’s fantastical parable. But when even the 10-year-olds speak in that oh-so-British deprecating irony and the cultural references and twists are exactly what you’d expect, then it’s ‘nao funcionnado’ as Firth’s character would say. After getting on a plane to Marseilles and tracking down his Portuguese immigrant house cleaner and successfully asking her to marry amid a crowd of locals. Of course, Curtis thinks he’s covered that. His knowledge of Portuguese would not allow him to read Pessoa, so his funny language raises a laugh. Lovely stuff. It really isn’t.
So as terrorists strike, poverty grinds and personal troughs proliferate, this was a film about the redemptive value of love, and Christmas. Yet the feelgood factor was flimsy. With its shallow fantasy and underdeveloped story lines, all Curtis can hope for is that it makes people forget one or all of these for a few hours so they can get on with the delusional business of buying more products to feel happy, like the film soundtrack or many of the gizmos featured in the film. Didn’t work for me, I went home and still felt depressed, at odds with this bullshit portrait of loving London life.
Holy Cross – BBC1, Monday 10 November
Broadcast either side of News at 10 coverage of the Bush visits, Riyadh bombings and the Iraq Occupation, BBC1 was in gritty realism mode with a dramatisation of recent events closer to home – the cross-community escalation in tension as the basic issue of Catholic girls getting to the Holy Cross school in Ardoyne, north Belfast became a pawn in a much wider game. Gritty indeed, words like ‘Taig’, ‘Fenian’ and ‘Hun’ were widerife as unemployed Protestant men plotted the ghettoisation of their area and their Catholic counterparts their reprisals, while mothers struggled to get their kids to school. There is a side issue explored in much more detail in the Bradford blog below about the effects of areas becoming monodefined by one faith, culture or race – prejudice becomes entrenched so learning about ‘diversity’ is viewed by some as a panacea to the sad problem when in fact integration is the only answer.
The drama was convincing, with solid performances from Green and Red, White & Blue, adult and child alike. Yet there was something grotesque and crudely voyeuristic about the TV nation, the couch potato crowd, the sofa electorate, enjoying a dramatisation of a hugely emotive, microcosmic event in the tragic history of the Troubles – far worse than a talking heads ‘n clips footage of the 9/11 towers or similar.
The credits rolled with the information that more than 100 of the girls went through post-traumatic stress and counselling. Did they really want their real-life terror relived so vividly so soon? Did the BBC embed any didactics into the screenplay? No. Filtering these events through camera and TV programme seemed feckless and crass.
