Pretentious, moi? Sally Potter, whose ego is so huge she once made a film about her own love of tango, starring herself, has decided to follow the advice write what you know’. She has written and directed a movie clearly based on her experiences as a teenager, and produced possibly the most indulgent, tedious, dull and frankly boring film of the year. She’s also done this with money from the BBC our cash, in other words, but maybe that’s an argument for a different time.
What is remarkable is that she’s gathered together some of the finest actors in the land to star in this A-level essay of a film. They all give their best, but with a script that seems to have been written by a pouty teenager with too many hormones and a crush on TS Eliot.
Set in the early 1960s it centres around two teenage best friends, Ginger and Rosa, who have the usual vices of discovering fags, booze and boys. Ginger has hopes of being a poet, but is also terrified of The Bomb, and becomes involved in CND. Rosa seems less political or arty, and her only interest appears to be in Ginger’s dad, an artist who was imprisoned during the War for being a conscientious objector. He’s such a sensitive soul he cries whenever Schubert comes on the radio.
The two friends seem to pull away from each other, as Ginger spends more time with her two yes, two godfathers, who are both also involved in CND. Her mum (Christina Hendricks) meanwhile seems to suspect that hubby is more interested in teenage girls than herself.
There’s a horrible moment about halfway through when a realisation dawns that Potter wants us to think these characters are actually working class. They couldn’t be more self-indulgently pretentiously middle-class if they tried, and Potter’s ludicrous script only makes things worse. Hendricks is the world’s most unlikely nagging wife, her husband is a massive drip of water, and Timothy Spall, Oliver Platt and Annette Bening try their hardest to be sympathetic as the godparents. The two girls do their best, and May is tragically under-used in a small role, though maybe she suspected her talents were wasted on this guff.
One more moan: if I see one more pouting, angst-ridden girl writing poetry on a bed with Miles Davis on the sounstrack I’ll probably be banned from screening rooms for ever. Potter should be put in a room and made to watch Singin’ In The Rain 3,000 times in a row until she gets it films are supposed to be a shared experience, not your personal therapy sessions for the rest of us to suffer through. Get over yourself.
Overall verdict: Teenage angst at its worst.
Reviewer: Mike Martin