Abosulte Beginners Review - The New Yorker 1986

The Current Cinema By Pauline Kael

"I thought, 'My lord, one thing is certain, and that's that they'll make musicals one day about the glamour-studded 1950s.'" This prophecy by the hero of Colin MacInnes's 1959 novel "Absolute Beginners" is a bitter joke: his next words are "And I thought, my heaven, one thing is certain too, I'm miserable." This narrator-hero, a hipster photographer, is just a kid- he's in his last year as teen-ager- but he's a smart, spirited kid (he has all the forty-four-year-old author's experience), and we see and feel street life in London in the summer of 1958 through his consciousness. The boy has no name in the novel, which is an inventive, slangy, poetic celebration of youth and jazz and the city, and a cry of disgust at the way teen-agers, who didn't emerge as a group with money to spend until the fifties, are already being commercialized and corrupted. He's called Colin in the ambitious, prophecy- fulfilling musical, directed by the thirty-one-year-old Julien Temple. "Ambitious" isn't a dig. The movie goes to hell in its second half, and the first half doesn't really work, either, but it's trying for something. Temple takes on the large order of producing a total vision- a stylized, widescreen musical in which the streets and shops and houses are all part of the set, with the camera swerving around corners, and the whole huge cast performs like a troupe doing street theatre. At times, it's like a nightmare of Vincente Minnelli staging the Brecht-Weill "Threepenny Opera" at M-G-M. The staging is full of "ideas," but none of them are carried very far- they don't amount to anything more than distraction and diversion. Everything is kept in motion, though not exactly to the music, and, whether because of the fast- cutting style that Temple developed from his work in rock videos or because of the generally undistinguished choreography, it's peculiarly unlyrical and ephemeral- the images leave no afterimages.

The movie has an Expressionist vividness- a glossy immediacy. It's a total vision, but of what? You can feel the flash and determination that went into it. What you don't feel is the tormented romanticism that made English adolescents in the seventies swear by the novel the way American kids had earlier sworn by "The Catcher in the Rye." In the movie we recognize that the "absolute beginners" who are just starting to experience their freedom when they're snared by one group of exploiters or another, but there's no strong feeling attached to the recognition. And we experience little of the hero's deep love of London, or the pain of disillusionment when street gangs attack the black immigrants from the West Indies and the authorities don't come to their aid- don't even condemn the attackers. Temple's teeming images have a look of their own but they're singularly short of emotion, and there are so many characters to keep track of and so much visual powie that the central story of Colin (Eddie O'Connell) and his love for Suzette (Patsy Kensit) doesn't have any dramatic weight. Partly, this is because the role of Colin is cast much too conventionally; what's needed is expressiveness, and Eddie O'Connell is just a good-looking kid, shallowly amiable, who can wear tight pants. With O'Connell in the role, Temple has no way to suggest the hero's quality of mind. So who cares when Colin sells out and becomes "a professional teen-ager"? That's what Eddie O'Connell is anyway. At first sight, Patsy Kensit seems a knockout. A blond doll with babyish cheeks and a petulant mouth, she's a harbinger of the Swinging London that will arrive in the sixties. But you don't see anything more in Kensit after your first look, and you don't hear much to care about when she sings "Having It All." She's generic, like O'Connell, and she's playing a sullen postmodern version of Jayne Mansfield in Frank Tashlin's 1956 "The Girl Can't Help It." So you don't feel bad about little Suzette's marrying for money and position rather than love.

The movie is slanted to youth, but it's the old pros who provide the entertaining little squiggles that keep it going. Some of the performers fit MacInnes's descriptions to a comic T. As Henley, dressmaker to the Queen, and the head of the Mayfair fashion house where the seventeen-year-old Suzette is a lowly assistant, James Fox is just a MacInnes described him- "looking like a superior footman on his day off." And he's funny at it. As total cynic Vendice Partners, the advertising man whom Colin has dealings with, David Bowie, thacthed with short blond hair, is "one of those young men with an old face, or old ones with a young one, hard to tell which." Bowie's Vendice has nifty gestures, like slicking his hair back over his ears with both hands- copping a feel of his own deluxe skull. As Colin's weakling father, Ray Davies (of the Kinks) brings a music-hall grunginess and bounce to his number "Quiet Life," and as the titian-haired gossip columnist Dido Lament the American Anita Morris has the wormy-rose beauty of a young Gabor sister- she definitely has "eyes [that] say she knows just how much you price will be." Julien Temple's work can be lively in the scenes where new characters are introduced. There are dozens of them (such as the talent agent, played by Lionel Blair, the psycho Flikker, played by Bruce Payne, and the amoral boy panderer Wizard, played by Graham Fletcher-Cook), who provide glints of humor and bits of grotesquerie but don't get a chance to do what you feel they could. Temple doesn't show any interest in developing them. He wouldn't have time anyway. The script, by Richard Burridge, Christopher Wicking, Don MacPherson, and probably others, tries to retain just about everybody in the book (which itself had more characters than MacInnes knew what to do with).

Sade appears in one sequence and sings "Killer Blow." She sounds just fine, and she has one real function here: she cools out the movie- the speeding images slow down and you get to rest your eyes on her. It may occur to you that her singing isn't right for the period, but everything is slightly off- the film isn't really set in the late fifties or any other period. It goes from one musical idiom to another, with the many performers singing in their own styles (and sometimes singing their own compositions) and the arrangements, by Gil Evans- sometimes more dissonant than you might expect in a pop musical- holding it all together. And it's impressive to see an attempt at a movie musical in which the songs carry much of the characterization and the plot. But it's as though the images were edited to different music. Despite Temple's background and his reputation, he doesn't seem to have a rhythmic style. You may register this at the beginning, when the camera and the cuts are at odds with the movements of the people in the street. And you may feel it quite acutely when Bowie has his big singing-and-tapping number "That's Motivation"- it's the only time in the movie that you're fully caught up in a performer's rhythm- and Temple gets jumpy and cuts away. The second half goes really bad: once the racial confrontations start and there's rioting in the streets, the music and the images seem to be coming from two different TV channels. The choreography is an inept homage to the high-kicking big rumble in "West Side Story," and there's so much of this rumbling that you can't help thinking that Jerome Robbins has a lot to answer for. The street fighting also carries a moldy burden of political didacticism. In the movie (though not in the novel), the violence is instigated by Henley and Vendice Partners, who are co-conspirators planning to make millions with real-estate developments on the sites of the slum dwellings. They employ the terror tactics of slumlords like Rachman, and we get a fanatic Oswald Mosley-Enoch Powell speech delivered (by Steven Berkoff) to a meeting of hate-filled bullies. The movie becomes a self-important mess. It puts itself on the side of virtue by having the psychos and neo-Fascists marching through the streets shouting the slogan "Deport All Niggers." A sign is also displayed calling for an end to "Jews, homos, and blacks," though the film keeps encouraging you to laugh at Henley's twitish prissiness and Colin calls him an "old queen."

For all the scattershot energy that has gone into "Absolute Beginners," it certainly doesn't give you the exhilaration of a musical. It's like a zippy, noisy commercial- all movement. Temple may represent a new phenomenon: a director perfectly attuned to rock videos- i.e., commercials that simulate the emotions of old movies, heightening them like crazy. In the book, the harshness of the material works because of MacInnes's strong poetic feelings; he's never just bitter- you always know there's love under the bitterness. Temple tries to make the harshness work by stylization; the result is a part-intentional, part-unintentional deconstruction of the Hollywood musical. There's all this fizz in his work and no feeling. Maybe only a director who came up via videos would stage a balletic race riot so confusingly that it's just about impossible to root for either side.

You may not be too distressed by all this unless you know the book- a precursor of Anthony Burgess's 1962 "A Clockwork Orange"- or give yourself the pleasure of reading it. This is a case where the movie's images are so weak that they don't compete with the book's. Colin MacInnes imparts his love of jazz; he even imparts some of the sensations of dancing. (The title "Absolute Beginners" is taken form the lowest category of dance classes.) He has his young narrator-hero describe what happened one night when he was on the dance floor with Suzette: "there we were, weaving together like a pair of springs connected by invisible elastic wires, until we reached that most glorious moment of all in dancing, that doesn't come often, and usually, admittedly, only when you're whipping it up a bit to show the multitude- that is, the dance starts to do it for you, you don't bloddy well know what you're up to any longer, except that you can't put a limb wrong anywhere, and your whole dam brain and sex and personality have actually become that dance, are it- it's heavenly!" MacInnes, who was born in 1914 and died in 1976, is so emotionally unarmored that he makes you feel that blissful high, and perhaps recall times when you experienced it. MacInnes was an artist; Temple, at this point, is only a wizard.

June 2nd 1986