Absolute Beginners (15.)
Directed by Julian Temple.
Starring Eddie O' Connell, Patsy Kensit, David Bowie, James Fox, Lionel Blair, Bruce Payne. 108 mins. 30th Anniversary edition, out on DVD from Second Sight from Monday 25th
The film Absolute Beginners has nothing much to offer but what it does have is a David Bowie title track that is truly remarkable; a song so purely uplifting that, even after three decades, when you hear it strike up with “Bub, bub, bah ooh” a part of you still believes that maybe, just maybe, Ab Beg might be worth one more go. The song can fly over mountains and laugh at the ocean; the film couldn't be trusted to find the frother on a cappuccino machine. It's a terrible, terrible, terrible film; virtually unwatchable but almost admirable. The British film industry has never lacked for puffed up chancers making foolhardy disasters, but in a land filled with mediocrity Absolute Beginners has a scope and ambition that is admirable. A gleaming, empty head musical about Soho in the late 50s, the first stirring on youth culture and the Notting Hill race riots, it's like a Cliff Richard film with pretensions; a Summer Holiday that thinks it is On The Road.
It is also a timely reminder of what happens when the British puff up their chests and believe that they can go it alone against the rest of the world. In the mid 80s the British production company Goldcrest, buoyed by the successes of Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Local Hero and The Killing Fields and spurred on by Colin Welland's bold Oscar proclamation “The British are Leaving, the British are Leaving,” decided to risk investing nearly £60 million on three films: Revolution with Al Pacino, The Mission with Robert De Niro and this, the cheapest of the three at £6 million, a crazily ambitious musical adaptation of the Colin MacInnes novel about Britain's first teenagers in Soho in 1958. All three flopped, and effectively bankrupted the studio.
Young 'uns will probably find it hard to believe just how painful the failure of Absolute Beginners was at the time. I can still remember the hurt of seeing this at the cinema and experiencing its total and abject failure. It was a production made under the constant threat of a kicking, its very existence seemed to irritate people yet when you got to see it, the shock was that it was even worse than its worst reviews. It was like every wet summer's day, every calamitous World Cup exit and no-Brits-left-in-the-last-week-of-Wimbledon, set to music. It really rammed home the reality of being stuck on an island of continual fiasco, a place trapped in a cycle of self-perpetuating folly – which is ironic because the film is a celebration of one of the few things we get right, youth culture.
It's the long hot summer of 1958 across London the first stirrings of teenage culture are being felt as Britain finally begins to shake off the dull austerity of the post war years and in Soho the sixties is being planned and instigated. Jazz is the cool music because the fledgling pop scene is still in the grasp of seedy impresarios of an Operation Yewtree bent on the look out for gullible youths to exploit. Colin (O'Connell) is a photographer living out his final teenage year on the streets of Soho and catching up on some sleep in the ghetto of Ladbroke Grove. He is in love with Crepe Suzette (Kensit, being very Kate Moss-ish), a fashion designer who he fears will be lured away from him for the superficial phonies. Colin is on some ill-defined mission to protect the integrity of the teen dream, but the bubble of his existence is about to be burst by a Mosley-esque fascist agitator who only speaks in rhyming couplets, played by Steven Berkoff.
The film is almost farcically bad in execution and conceptually inept. It's a musical with mostly terrible songs and terrible sound recording. When a brick goes through a window the sound of breaking glass seems to have come from an old BBC Sound Effects album, while during the musical numbers the disjunction between the performers who are shown to be performing the songs, and the performances we are hearing is so great it is like on Top Of The Pops when the people on stage can't hear the playback.
The film is a treasure trove of 50s/ 60s nicknacks but preserved through the medium of glossy 80s tat. The trite, clichéd, but utterly unavoidable observation to make about the film is that it is like a series of music videos stuck together with no real tangible connection between them. People blurt out what the film is about but then the film zig zags its way onto something else, afraid of being caught in the same spot for more than a few minutes. At the time Channel 4 had a thing for epic variety shows like The Tube or Saturday Live which would be hour and a half exercises in throwing lots of different kinds of mud at a wall and hoping some of it stuck, and Ab Beg follows that vibe completely, except instead of a Jools or a Benelton to guide us, we had Eddie O’ Connell.
Nobody, not even Julian Temple, has been more besmirched by their association with Absolute Beginners than its lead performer. But he's really not that bad. He seems more in tune with the piece than the others and he does look and sound like he could be David Bowie's son, which foreshadows him falling under the spell of Bowie's venal advertising man Vendice Partners later in the film. He has a bit of substance to him, unlike all the other caricature figures in the film. It seems very unfair to pick on him in his first screen role when many more experienced performers make much bigger fools of themselves. There are some good performances in the film though: Paul Rhys has real screen presence and Bruce Payne offers some real menace. (Also a young Carmen Ejogo, who was Martin Luther King's wife in Selma, makes her first screen appearance.)
In some ways it's all Paul Weller's fault. At the start of the eighties The Jam released a single called Absolute Beginners and he started banging on about MacInnes. By the time the film was in production he had swapped mod/ punk anger for The Style Council and was riling against the fake, empty consumerism of Thatcher's yuppies, by providing fake, empty consumerist jazz to be the soundtrack of their trips to the wine bar. The Style Council provide the track Have You Ever Had It Blue? and their imprint is all over it: in the way it's trying to carry off a style and a look that isn't natural to it, and doing it because it thinks it's striking a blow against the drab, restrictive confines of British society.
And yet of the three films that sunk Goldcrest, it was probably the only one worth taking a punt on – Revolution is an atrocious endeavour (and a much bigger money loser) while Roland Joffe's The Mission is the epitome of the kind of classy, up market filmmaking that is full of quality but isn't actually any good. The opening Steadicam shot in Ab Beg is impressive; as it sweeps you through the giant Soho set it revs you up for the film. (Scorsese was a fan of it apparently.) The film's vision of Soho seems to have been borrowed from Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, a sleazy and absurd exaggeration filled with stunning colours. And that's the thing: the film sounds horrible, moves clumsily but looks gorgeous, so much so that a day after seeing it you can look at one of the beautiful composed stills and still think it might be worth another look. It is like the most insidious advertising campaign – it makes you think you want it even after you've tried it and know that it stinks.
It is absurdly ambitious. It looks like the misfire of a big name Hollywood auteur – Coppola's One From The Heart, Spielberg's 1941, Scorsese's New York, New York – rather than some bloke who had made some music videos and a film about the Sex Pistols (albeit, a damn fine film about the Sex Pistols.) When you consider all that it is trying to pull off – to be a breathless old style musical that spoke to a contemporary audiences while addressing history in a tableau that was designed to capture the birth of British pop culture – the salient point about Temple and his cast and team is not that they failed so spectacularly but that they even had the vision to imagine such a film and the audacity to attempt it.
Extras.
An interesting 50 minute documentary about its making in which the main players involved – Julian Temple (compulsively scratching), producers Nik Powell and Stephen Woolley and even Eddie O' Connell – look back at the film 30 years on and the problems of getting it made. It's a one sided account and even after all these years they are all still a little too pleased with themselves for their reckless ambition and underdog achievements. Temple was effectively sacked after filming finished and not allowed in the editing suite. The film was edited by three separate teams who worked on the beginning, middle and the end. It makes you wonder what it might've been like if they had been allowed to finish it properly, but those interviewed don't have the front to suggest that there might be a lost masterpiece in there somewhere.
Directed by Julian Temple.
Starring Eddie O' Connell, Patsy Kensit, David Bowie, James Fox, Lionel Blair, Bruce Payne. 108 mins. 30th Anniversary edition, out on DVD from Second Sight from Monday 25th
The film Absolute Beginners has nothing much to offer but what it does have is a David Bowie title track that is truly remarkable; a song so purely uplifting that, even after three decades, when you hear it strike up with “Bub, bub, bah ooh” a part of you still believes that maybe, just maybe, Ab Beg might be worth one more go. The song can fly over mountains and laugh at the ocean; the film couldn't be trusted to find the frother on a cappuccino machine. It's a terrible, terrible, terrible film; virtually unwatchable but almost admirable. The British film industry has never lacked for puffed up chancers making foolhardy disasters, but in a land filled with mediocrity Absolute Beginners has a scope and ambition that is admirable. A gleaming, empty head musical about Soho in the late 50s, the first stirring on youth culture and the Notting Hill race riots, it's like a Cliff Richard film with pretensions; a Summer Holiday that thinks it is On The Road.
It is also a timely reminder of what happens when the British puff up their chests and believe that they can go it alone against the rest of the world. In the mid 80s the British production company Goldcrest, buoyed by the successes of Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Local Hero and The Killing Fields and spurred on by Colin Welland's bold Oscar proclamation “The British are Leaving, the British are Leaving,” decided to risk investing nearly £60 million on three films: Revolution with Al Pacino, The Mission with Robert De Niro and this, the cheapest of the three at £6 million, a crazily ambitious musical adaptation of the Colin MacInnes novel about Britain's first teenagers in Soho in 1958. All three flopped, and effectively bankrupted the studio.
Young 'uns will probably find it hard to believe just how painful the failure of Absolute Beginners was at the time. I can still remember the hurt of seeing this at the cinema and experiencing its total and abject failure. It was a production made under the constant threat of a kicking, its very existence seemed to irritate people yet when you got to see it, the shock was that it was even worse than its worst reviews. It was like every wet summer's day, every calamitous World Cup exit and no-Brits-left-in-the-last-week-of-Wimbledon, set to music. It really rammed home the reality of being stuck on an island of continual fiasco, a place trapped in a cycle of self-perpetuating folly – which is ironic because the film is a celebration of one of the few things we get right, youth culture.
It's the long hot summer of 1958 across London the first stirrings of teenage culture are being felt as Britain finally begins to shake off the dull austerity of the post war years and in Soho the sixties is being planned and instigated. Jazz is the cool music because the fledgling pop scene is still in the grasp of seedy impresarios of an Operation Yewtree bent on the look out for gullible youths to exploit. Colin (O'Connell) is a photographer living out his final teenage year on the streets of Soho and catching up on some sleep in the ghetto of Ladbroke Grove. He is in love with Crepe Suzette (Kensit, being very Kate Moss-ish), a fashion designer who he fears will be lured away from him for the superficial phonies. Colin is on some ill-defined mission to protect the integrity of the teen dream, but the bubble of his existence is about to be burst by a Mosley-esque fascist agitator who only speaks in rhyming couplets, played by Steven Berkoff.
The film is almost farcically bad in execution and conceptually inept. It's a musical with mostly terrible songs and terrible sound recording. When a brick goes through a window the sound of breaking glass seems to have come from an old BBC Sound Effects album, while during the musical numbers the disjunction between the performers who are shown to be performing the songs, and the performances we are hearing is so great it is like on Top Of The Pops when the people on stage can't hear the playback.
The film is a treasure trove of 50s/ 60s nicknacks but preserved through the medium of glossy 80s tat. The trite, clichéd, but utterly unavoidable observation to make about the film is that it is like a series of music videos stuck together with no real tangible connection between them. People blurt out what the film is about but then the film zig zags its way onto something else, afraid of being caught in the same spot for more than a few minutes. At the time Channel 4 had a thing for epic variety shows like The Tube or Saturday Live which would be hour and a half exercises in throwing lots of different kinds of mud at a wall and hoping some of it stuck, and Ab Beg follows that vibe completely, except instead of a Jools or a Benelton to guide us, we had Eddie O’ Connell.
Nobody, not even Julian Temple, has been more besmirched by their association with Absolute Beginners than its lead performer. But he's really not that bad. He seems more in tune with the piece than the others and he does look and sound like he could be David Bowie's son, which foreshadows him falling under the spell of Bowie's venal advertising man Vendice Partners later in the film. He has a bit of substance to him, unlike all the other caricature figures in the film. It seems very unfair to pick on him in his first screen role when many more experienced performers make much bigger fools of themselves. There are some good performances in the film though: Paul Rhys has real screen presence and Bruce Payne offers some real menace. (Also a young Carmen Ejogo, who was Martin Luther King's wife in Selma, makes her first screen appearance.)
In some ways it's all Paul Weller's fault. At the start of the eighties The Jam released a single called Absolute Beginners and he started banging on about MacInnes. By the time the film was in production he had swapped mod/ punk anger for The Style Council and was riling against the fake, empty consumerism of Thatcher's yuppies, by providing fake, empty consumerist jazz to be the soundtrack of their trips to the wine bar. The Style Council provide the track Have You Ever Had It Blue? and their imprint is all over it: in the way it's trying to carry off a style and a look that isn't natural to it, and doing it because it thinks it's striking a blow against the drab, restrictive confines of British society.
And yet of the three films that sunk Goldcrest, it was probably the only one worth taking a punt on – Revolution is an atrocious endeavour (and a much bigger money loser) while Roland Joffe's The Mission is the epitome of the kind of classy, up market filmmaking that is full of quality but isn't actually any good. The opening Steadicam shot in Ab Beg is impressive; as it sweeps you through the giant Soho set it revs you up for the film. (Scorsese was a fan of it apparently.) The film's vision of Soho seems to have been borrowed from Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, a sleazy and absurd exaggeration filled with stunning colours. And that's the thing: the film sounds horrible, moves clumsily but looks gorgeous, so much so that a day after seeing it you can look at one of the beautiful composed stills and still think it might be worth another look. It is like the most insidious advertising campaign – it makes you think you want it even after you've tried it and know that it stinks.
It is absurdly ambitious. It looks like the misfire of a big name Hollywood auteur – Coppola's One From The Heart, Spielberg's 1941, Scorsese's New York, New York – rather than some bloke who had made some music videos and a film about the Sex Pistols (albeit, a damn fine film about the Sex Pistols.) When you consider all that it is trying to pull off – to be a breathless old style musical that spoke to a contemporary audiences while addressing history in a tableau that was designed to capture the birth of British pop culture – the salient point about Temple and his cast and team is not that they failed so spectacularly but that they even had the vision to imagine such a film and the audacity to attempt it.
Extras.
An interesting 50 minute documentary about its making in which the main players involved – Julian Temple (compulsively scratching), producers Nik Powell and Stephen Woolley and even Eddie O' Connell – look back at the film 30 years on and the problems of getting it made. It's a one sided account and even after all these years they are all still a little too pleased with themselves for their reckless ambition and underdog achievements. Temple was effectively sacked after filming finished and not allowed in the editing suite. The film was edited by three separate teams who worked on the beginning, middle and the end. It makes you wonder what it might've been like if they had been allowed to finish it properly, but those interviewed don't have the front to suggest that there might be a lost masterpiece in there somewhere.
