ARTS

Cinema

Absolute Beginners (`5' selected cinemas

Back to the Fifties

Peter Ackroyd

In retrospect the Fifties seem only a partly reassuring time — drained, faded, a black-and-white photograph of an era. But grey skies often contain thunder; this was the last decade before everything in Eng- land changed irrevocably, and already there were intimations of restlessness. That is why Absolute Beginners opens in the summer of 1958 when, according to the commentary, for the first time 'kids be- came teenagers'. The film opens with a dance sequence on the streets of Soho and ends with a race riot on the streets of Not- ting Hill, and between these two wretched emblems of London's decline it touches upon all the areas of likely trouble: adver- tising, television, popular music and bigotry. This is a morality play set to music or, perhaps, a fantasy stained with real blood.

But if it is about the betrayal of inno- cence, that precious commodity at first seems set to prosper; in the opening sequence the streets of Soho are turned into a kind of phantasmagoria as black and white, `bent' and `straight', the wild and the wonderful, celebrate, with an act of foresight unparalleled in the history of urban society, their coming liberation. All the tarts and pimps and wide-boys cannot wait for the Sixties, and a mini-skirt is miraculously displayed as an emblem of that tatty apocalypse.

Of course it wasn't like that at all and the slightly vapid tone of the proceedings, using music and dance that is both diffuse and heterogeneous, suggests that the film- makers themselves do not have any very definite grasp of the period — or even of their own attitude towards it. Fortunately iney have relied instead upon a repertoire of extravagant effects — not the least of which is Lionel Blair.

No film which 'stars' him as a paedophi- liac theatrical agent can be all bad, but in fact he is only one of the period pieces in a film which stunningly and unfailingly looks right. This is not just a matter of topogra- phy, although the dusty avenues of Notting Hill and the glittering alleys of Soho have been carefully recreated (if there is an award for sets, this film should receive it). It is really a question of acting. Eddie O'Connell as the hero, Colin, looked and behaved exactly as young people were once meant to do; he was like a whippet with a quiff. And James Fox, as a queenly couturier, assisted Lionel Blair in evoking that swishness which was an integral ele- ment in London life of the Fifties; in those days a pansy was a pansy, and didn't allow anyone to say any different. But if there is such a thing as a Fifties face, David Bowie, with his notably plastic features, best ex- emplifies it here: he plays a vulpine adver- tising agent and at one stroke erases any memories of recent bad performances on the large screen. Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence is forgiven. There are others Alan Freeman, Mandy Rice-Davies, Sylvia Syms, Jess Conrad among them.

The plot itself does not make a great deal of sense but its relative incoherence hardly matters, since the serpentine story of one photographer's pursuit of happiness is really only an excuse for a number of musical sequences. The director of the film, Julien Temple, has previously been responsible for a number of pop videos a fact which has led to an orgy of recri- `Sorry sir, you can't come in, you're too old.' minations from various semi-intellectuals who couldn't take a Polaroid snap without assistance. The point endlessly made about such 'videos' is that they are, by their nature, established around songs: it is necessary for them to possess the max- imum visual appeal, at the expense of any subtlety in narrative or characterisation. But under the circumstances Mr Temple has made an ambitious attempt to widen the range of his concerns, and to a large

extent he has succeeded — Absolute Begin- ners is emphatically not a series of 'poi'

videos' stitched together. It has a more consistent energy, and a more insistent theme.

It may still be rather short on character- isation, and rather long on general musical uplift, but no one who has seen West Side Story or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers can legitimately claim that this film Is

thereby destroying the traditions of the western musical. They all have ridiculous or unnecessary plots — and not many of them have either the agreeable songs or the wonderful choreography which mark this particular production. There are other compensations for the more serious-minded, however. The script

was very sharp, except on those occasions

when a poignant note was deemed to be necessary, and I particularly liked the

manner in which a certain rancid Roman-

ticism was smuggled in. A blue plaque to Percy Bysshe Shelley is prominently dis- played on a grimy Soho wall, and at one

moment the young hero is seen in the sane position as the dead Chatterton of Henry Wallis's portrait. These little hints may have been inadvertent, but they do power- fully reinforce the mood of a film which Is essentially concerned with the betrayal of innocence. Apparently it is nothing like Coln Maclnnes's novel, upon which it is 'based • Various people are now busy rediscovering Mr MacInnes as a major writer whose precious substance has been needlessly

dissipated by the callow youth of the Eighties; this may or may not be true but in any case that myth of the `outsider', of the Bayswater and Soho layabout', with all its

self-conscious seediness and wilful self' pity, has always left me cold. Such peoPle, mistake a putative tohemianism' for real ability; the fact that Mr MacInnes prefer' red the company of black people and 01

various low-life 'characters' does not auto matically turn him into a writer of genius or even of talent.

And even if Absolute Beginners is an Eighties view of the Fifties, rather than a Fifties view of the Fifties, at least it is free of that comfortable cultural nostalgia which is so prevalent in American films set in that same decade. Film-makers like Spielberg and Coppola have created day- dreams of adolescence, fuelled largely by images from early television; Absolute Beginners is much sharper, and manages to retain its conviction as a musical while at the same time uncovering all those potent little seeds of tackiness and despair which flourish in our own time. This a difficult trick to pull off, and it is some measure of the film's success that it goes at least some Way towards doing so. Certain sequences may be a little messy, but the general range and ambition of the production ought to be saluted.