Absolute Beginners

Dir: Julien Temple

1986

****

Julien Temple's outlandish rock musical is an overlooked and underappreciated classic and a brilliant adaptation of Colin MacInnes's overlooked and underappreciated novel. MacInnes's 1959 novel deals largely with London life in the late 50s, areas of vibrancy but abject poverty where immigrants, homosexuals and drug addicts live together in the margins of society. The film follows the novels story and changes little apart from the fact it's a larger than life musical but it works extremely well. It still has an authenticity about it though, with people like Edward Tudor-Pole playing A Teddy Boy with far-right tenancies and Lionel Blair playing 'Harry Charms', based on the infamous Larry Parnes, there is something quite effective about it. Julien Temple was criticized upon the film's release however by many who held the novel in high regard, as well as those who didn't like it in the first place. The British film industry was in turmoil at the time - even though some great little films were being made - and the press didn't like to shy away from laying on the doom, even when it wasn't justified. However, it was once described as being a flawed attempt to harness the contemporary musical in the services of politics and social equality and that it fell very short of capturing the tormented romanticism that made English adolescents in the 1970s swear by the by the novel the same way American kids had earlier sworn by The Catcher in the Rye. You do have to wonder how MacInnes would have reacted to it but this was a 1986 reaction to the story, how could Temple have made anything other? Personally, I thought Temple highlighted many of the same events that were happening in the 80s that mirrored the events of the 50s and showed them for being the ridiculous events that they were. He showed what a broken record this country is through exuberant exaggeration, a truly 80s response to such a thing. It may not have made sense at the time but in retrospect it's just as fascinating as the original novel. The rise of the far right was back with vengeance, immigrants were once again the focus of attack, capitalism was at its peak and even Teddy Boy fashion was making a comeback. The film ends with the Notting Hill Race Riots of 68, a very sad day in recent history. The film was made in 1986, a couple of years between two of the worse riots this country has ever seen. For every bastardization of the original novel that there is, there is an interesting historical comparison that only now can we see, understand and learn from. There is so much more to the film than is ever given credit for, I believe it should be seen as more than just a cult hit and the film that finished Goldcrest. The truth is the studio just didn't know how to handle time and money, they never made a single bad film in their history.