Julien Temple (1986)

I knew that Absolute Beginners was, at the time, one of the most expensive films ever made in Britain and a much-hyped flop at the box office.  I somehow expected it to be a more interesting failure than it is (or than its first half is:  Sally and I didn’t see it through).  The messy scene-setting number that opens the film – in stylised Soho streets – suggests material adapted from a stage musical that worked in the theatre but which a film-maker isn’t sure how to translate to the screen.   In fact, there’s no such excuse:  Absolute Beginners, based on Colin MacInnes’s novel, is an original movie musical.  According to Pauline Kael, in her surprisingly indulgent review of the film, MacInnes’s title ‘is taken from the lowest category of dance classes’.   You could say there’s therefore a dismaying aptness to the chaos of the choreography (credited to David Toguri and Jonathan Thornton) – or, at least, the chaos of Julien Temple’s presentation of the dancing, which is enough to make Mamma Mia! look like Cabaret.    Temple was known at the time as the director of the 1979 mockumentary The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle; of the filmed record of one of the Amnesty International ‘Secret Policeman’s Ball’ fund-raisers, featuring the Pythons et al; and, especially, of pop videos, including Culture Club’s ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me’, Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ ‘Come on Eileen’ and the Kinks’ ‘Come Dancing’.  He hadn’t previously tried his hand at anything as ambitious as a ‘Drama, Fantasy, Musical’, which is how IMDB defines Absolute Beginners.

Colin MacInnes’s book was published in 1959.  The story is set in London in the summer months of the previous year and the film’s opening titles are accompanied by a series of photographs meant to evoke the late fifties (Harold Macmillan, and so on).  Almost as soon as the action is underway, however, the historical milieu becomes less certain.  The two central characters in the story are Colin (Eddie O’Connell), a young photographer, and the girl he adores, Crêpe Suzette (Patsy Kensit), who’s ambitious for success as a fashion designer.  Appearing in Colin’s imagination as he gets ready for a night on the town, Patsy Kensit’s Suzette isn’t a 1950s image:  her look immediately brings to mind one of the iconic Swinging London models’ faces of the following decade.  As the film goes on (beyond the point we parted company from it), the musical contributions – from Sade, The Style Council and others who were big at the time when Absolute Beginners was made – become more unashamedly anachronistic yet the film seems still to want to confirm its 1958 credentials, including sequences based on the Notting Hill race riots of that year.

Although the narrator of the novel is the unnamed, eighteen-going-on-nineteen-year old photographer on whom the Colin of the film is based, MacInnes was in his mid-forties when he wrote Absolute Beginners.  A main theme of the book is the advent of the teenager in 1950s Britain – the sense of liberation this brought with it, the instant commercialisation of teenage culture that accompanied it:

‘This teenage ball had had a real splendour in the days when the kids discovered that, for the first time since centuries of kingdom-come, they’d money, which hitherto had always been denied to us at the best time in life to use it, namely, when you’re young and strong, and also before the newspapers and telly got hold of this teenage fable and prostituted it as conscripts seem to do everything they touch.’

Julien Temple’s version of Absolute Beginners comes across as an illustration of the commodification of the teenage brand that MacInnes was critiquing.   But ‘come across’ isn’t the right phrase:  the film is so incoherent that it’s bewildering.  (For example, in that opening routine, Colin describes the cast of regular Soho ‘characters’ but they are visually a succession of blurs:  the introductions are pointless.)  There were moments when I wondered if the mostly terrible performances were deliberate – a parody of the kind of ropey acting you often get in late 1950s and early 1960s British pop films aimed at a teenage audience.  (In retrospect, I don’t think this was the intention.)  Eddie O’Connell, as Colin, has the look, as well as the wooden delivery, of a one-hit wonder of the era; it’s not surprising that this actor has been little heard of since.   Patsy Kensit is incredibly pretty – even though, wearing fluorescent lipstick, her face is sometimes lit in a way that gives her a moustache.  She’s incredible too as the heartless careerist she’s meant to be (Suzette is summarised in the list of characters in the Wikipedia article on the novel as ‘a promiscuous negrophile who intends to enter into a sexless marriage with her boss’).   Patsy Kensit is innocuous – and embarrassing when she’s pretending to be vampish.   She’s less cringe-making, though, than the likes of James Fox, hideously knowing as a camp Mayfair couturier.

The cast also includes David Bowie, Ray Davies and others who wrote the songs they perform.   I didn’t stick around long enough to see Bowie but he sings the pleasant title track over the opening credits.  I stayed just long enough to see Davies, who plays Colin’s put upon father and sings a number called ‘Quiet Life’, which at least has a bit of the melancholy wit and charm of his better-known compositions.  This is damning with faint praise in the circumstances but I was glad that Ray Davies’s acting was relatively OK and his singing voice is so distinctive that his contribution is a highlight.  The image of the family home that introduces Davies’s number – a cross-section of its rooms that gives a doll’s house effect – is one of the few visual details that I saw which had any charm.  Colin’s sexually available mother is played by Mandy Rice-Davies, a nudge-nudge piece of casting.

The screenplay is credited to Richard Burridge.   That name rang a bell and, writing this note, I remembered from where.  Later in the 1980s, a Richard Burridge became well known as the owner of Desert Orchid.  Sports news reports routinely referred to the owner’s connections with the film industry, describing his great horse’s triumphs as a-fairy-story-no-Hollywood-scriptwriter-could-dream-up etc.   It is the same man.  In interviews in the winner’s enclosure, Burridge invariably seemed a nice chap, and I hope his name will always be associated with Desert Orchid rather than Absolute Beginners.

17 September 2015