1962: Death in Venice (California)

1962. In year of the Bay of Pigs and Marilyn Monroe’s death, George is an English professor of English at a slightly crummy West Coast school.

Like many English gay men of his generation George is fastidious, slightly waspish, up tight, and seriouly crippled inside. Having grown up in a society where his homosexuality was illegal, he has developed a rigid carapace of outward perfection behind which to try and live some kind of real life.

On the surface George has been rigidly correct. His only chance of finding real love has come from playing the conventions of a kind of coded gay freemasonry. Let out on the West Coast, being English is half that game, and in 1946 George managed to land Jim, a handsome young naval officer, as a lover. All went swimmingly with Jim for 16 years. Sadly Jim has died in a James Dean style auto smash. They wouldn't even allow George to attend the funeral, and behind George’s carapace, life is now a bloody great void. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps on the petty pace of George’s grief, from day to day. He feels he’s drowing in slow motion, and as Marilyn used to say, something’s gotta give.

Time, perhaps, for a last fling with George’s pathetic old excuse for a girlfriend Charley, faultlessly rendered by Julianne Moore. Charley is genuinely friendly, bubbly even, but well past her sell-by date. They have been friends since way back in London, fumbled under the sheets even, but she has been running on empty for years, even before her crappy marriage broke up, and is desperate for love. Everyone, including herself, knows she is wasting her time really, but can’t admit it.

And there friends, is 90% of the plot of Tom Ford’s A Single Man. It is a dense and beautifully crafted exploration of what life was like for Christopher Isherwood’s generation of gay men, and the performance of Colin Firth’s life. As usual he gets his shirt off underwater, but if you’ve been thinking of him as an amiable accessory for chick flicks, please think again.

Being George requires an extended feat of doing almost nothing externally, whilst being fully charged and fit to burst. Mr Firth does a brilliant job, beautifully executed, combining depth with poignancy and a quality the British seldom even recognise that the French call tendresse. This emotional charge is absolutely essential because without it, such has been the sea change in societal attitudes since 1962 that, unlike the original readers of Isherwood’s novel, most viewers under 40 will have absolutely no idea what all the fuss was about. This may be why some critics see the film as shallow. Why doesn’t George, they wonder, just get on with being gay? In its historical context, however, this film is anything but shallow.

So it is that a film by a fashion designer with almost no plot becomes a major work of art. It deserves a perfect ten.

X-Factor woos world?

This was the X-factor weekend, with audience figures to take TV executives back to the glory days of TV in the 1960’s, when 21 million people would be tuned into the same thing every evening, and everyone would talk about it next day at work.

That such a thing is still possible says something very interesting about the media landscape in which we live. Formulae with, er, real X-factor can still make it dramatically big in the UK.
However, such major bests will almost inevitably be few and far between, when you consider all that has to go into them:

• The products themselves have to be exceptional — exceptionally big, brassy, classy, appealing, attention grabbing, and well crafted. This does not come cheap.
  
• They will establish themselves, as X-factor has, in various parallel media simultaneously, nimble, and drivem by social buzz.
• They will have multiple age appeal, embed themselves in particular communities
• They will be driven by both established personalities and rags-to-riches characters, based on people with a genuine talent to entertain in the conventional sense. All this with a streak of 1950's holiday camp knobbly-knees competition.
• This makes almost a perfect firestorm for personal engagement, all strands reinforcing the others, with a considerable commitment to excellence all round, and a lot of hard work.

Such programming can’t be churned out by the yard, because part of its appeal is its occasional nature. The good news is that Big Brother was only a bad dream, and millions are still most profoundly engaged by other people with a real talent to entertain. Ah, bless.

And what of Simon Cowell? It’s fashionable to be rather snooty about him, and the shedload of money he’s made for himself and ITV. He may or may not be a particularly pleasant character. Actually I’d place serious money on the notion that he’s very much more personally engaging and switched on than some of the parodies would imply. Generating the chemistry and ideas to bring a thing like this together does require remarkable talent. He’s not the only winner of the show. As well as the people it benefits it has a real community impact, locally and nationally. Bringing people together like this can’t be all bad, surely.

Anyway it’s fun for those of us old enough to remember thirty years ago, to be be taken back down memory lane to the dear old days when the nation could all talk on a Monday morning about the same thing on the telly last night...

An Education: young, gifted and stuck

Back in the 1590’s’s when Popes were Popes, Painters were Giants of the Italian renaissance who churned out jumbo ceilings and monumental walls heaving with large-as-life-and-twice-as-natural centaurs, heroes and gods, accompanied by chunky putti. The English, on the other hand, excelled at miniatures — tiny, intensely personal studies the size of passport photos. Titter ye not. It was a highly skilled art form.

Fast forward from the 1590’s to the 1950’s. An Education, like Michael Caine’s Is Anybody There? is a miniature. It's a closely observed study of growing up before the Chatterley Trial and the Beatles’ first LP. In 1961 God was still in his heaven, and all was right with the world. Suburban Surbiton was several thousand miles away from Zabriskie Point. Everything was just off the ration, but felt as though it was supposed to be still on it. In this drab universe, Cliff Richard was positively orgasmatronic. Sylvia Plath knew the real score:

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.

On 11 February 1963, Sylvia Plath stuck her head in a gas oven, in the house where W. B. Yeats had once lived. In the world she was leaving behind, aertex-clad Grammar school girls spent hours standing around in the rain with their cellos, walking down corridors with books on their heads, pretending to be old men in class Shakespeare read-throughs, and charging up and down frozen hockey pitches wondering why their legs were going puce. In the evenings they could relieve the boredom by learning irregular Latin verbs and cramming for Oxford. Life was almost as boring for 60’s schoolboys, but they had the goon show and Radio Luxembourg under the bedclothes.

Into this terminally grey world drives a flash geezer in a Bristol, a glamorous maroon roadster with three headlights and a glove compartment full of exotic cigarettes. Confused? You will be. Especially when your drab but well meaning parents start opening the sherry for him, months before Christmas. This is an intensely atmospheric, beautifully crafted film. It is brilliantly and subtly acted, finely observed down to the tentative way Carey Mulligan handles a cigarette, in exactly the way teenagers being naughty in the sixties did.


Nick Hornby’s screenplay is precisely right, managing to be substantial without being preachy. That’s a relief because otherwise the whole show could easily turn into a high class sex education morality play. It doesn’t, thanks to the consummate skill and lightness of touch of the actors, great direction, and casting the film in a flat natural light that conveys the feel of the story and its context precisely. Never again will you make the mistake of thinking the UK in the sixties was some kind of continuous full-on acid trip. Not in Surbiton it wasn’t.

So, If you like intense, atmospheric beatufully crafted, personal films, An Education will be one of the secret delights of the year. Vin Diesel fans may prefer to sit this one out. 4·5 stars out of 5.

Rocking all over the world?

The Boat the Rocked is garish, jolly rumbustuous and profoundly nostalgic for anyone who ever tuned their tranny radio under the bedclothes, or owned a Dansette. Its cast of misfits and Barons of Beat is as superb a gang of British character actors as you will ever find bobbing around in the North Sea twenty miles off Lowestoft. Bill Nighy is a true diamond geezer. You even get Ken and Em chucked in for good measure, ranged appropriately on opposing sides. The plot is simple, perhaps a tad too simple, but whaddaya experct? King Lear? The film also has an authentic sixties coming of age subtext. The music is the Right Stuff, served up immaculately, although one may wonder why the needle never skipped, even as das boot crashdived.

I should also lay cards on the table and say I am, at heart, a Richard Curtis fan. Why shouldn't people make films about sweetness and light? However, sadly, something was missing, and I can’t quite put my finger on what. Did everyone enjoy themselves just a bit too much making it? Is the plot just too twiggy? Are the waters too shallow? Is there, in fact, a natural limit to the fun that can be had out of a bunch of bachelor boys bobbing around on the ocean in NHS specs with rubber johnnies but no girls?

Back in the 60’s popstars made uniquely British teenage “keep your hair on, daddy-o” middle class romps. The concept took a bunch of average grammar school kids — bubbly, rebellious in small ways, and slightly misunderstood. Their dim restrictive parents always turned out OK in the end. For a few years this was a surprisingly popular and compelling formula, for it reflected real feelings. “Come on kids! We’re all going on a summer holiday, in spite of our parents. There’s plenty of pop, we’ve got a real guitar, and we know some girls who may want to join us.” These movies were painfully, authentically, 1960’s. It irks me to admit it, but Cliff Richard was probably the master of the genre.

Nobody has been bold enough to make such a movie for at least thirty years, so I applaud the effort, and enjoyed the show. For all its may excellencies, TBTR is probably something of a niche product. It ain’t no Four Weddings, nor is it quite Mama Mia for Males, but if you like the basic pitch and don’t mind the clichéd script and plot, it yield an enjoyable evening out. Another three and a half out of five...

How we live now, envisaged in 1969

These are the days! 2009, seen from forty years ago. Mrs Emma Peel spends money at a remote department store, whilst, naturally, hubby pays all her bills. Both grownups spy on the kids all day long, when they’re not swimming. The lounge looks like the backroom at Radio Rentals, and, using a “home post office” you can even message the people next door instantaneously...

It’s amazing how they got so much of the techie bit right, but rather failed to predict fundamental changes in social and cultural attitudes...
major h/t John Halton (Via Twitter)

Like a Puppet on a String

I’m glad to see that Tim Chesterton’s 60’s upbringing included the Very British medium of Gerry Anderson puppet shows. Peter Cook & Dudley Moore scaled the heights of this art form in ways that still induce Shock ’n Awe:

It’s a considerable relief that fallings out between Christians don’t ever involve motivelessly evil puppets or the senseless random destruction of national institutions — there’s always a reason for the behaviours in our fellow Christians that most vex and astound us, if only we can be bothered to look for it from their point of view...