Financial Times, 16 July 1992, by Nigel Andrews. ----------------------------------------------------------- MY COUSIN VINNY (15) Odeons West End and Marble Arch DAKOTA ROAD National Film Theatre BELLE DE JOUR (18) MGM Swiss Centre, Everyman THE cinema-going scene in Britain now resembles one of those hi-tech television weather maps. Swirling across the Atlantic is an airborne army of thunderclouds, lightning forks and jiggling white arrows, signalling that the full force of Hollywood's sequel season will soon reach the UK. Meanwhile, like a smaller army of Ian McCaskills, British film critics pipe out warnings as the weather and TV graphics run riot. Britain is a sitting target for this treatment. Each summer its cinema exhibition business curls up into a catatonic ball, convinced that most filmgoers not on holiday abroad will be attached to their Wimbledon/test cricket audiovisual drip feeds. What price a fair-to-good film at their local cinema? Ergo: summer audiences must be given either rescued-from-the-shelf rubbish which would not make money even in a good film-going season, or overblown American sequels that cannot be resisted, at least by addicts, even in a bad film-going season. The logic is impeccable; the situation is nightmarish. And not just for a British film industry rejoicing in two meagre openings this month: one a cartoon about a frog working for British Intelligence (sic), the other a two-year-old arthouse misfire (see below). No, we are in nightmare territory because the conclusion has been reached by the film world's marketing brains that in adverse circumstances you cannot woo the public, you can only mug it. Movies large of spectacle and empty of content are the most potent weapon. They are light enough to lift up in the air, yet hard enough to concuss the audience when brought down on its head. Sequelitis is an essential component of this campaign. In high summer, few filmgoers have the energy to meet new characters or adjust to new plot ideas. They yearn only for the ritualistic and ongoing, cinema's equivalent of Wimbledon or test cricket. Hence the umpteenth return of the caped crusader, of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in lethal harness, of Sigourney Weaver in space battling Old Saliva Jaws. It would be an act of Canute-like futility to sit on the shores of Britain ordering Hollywood's sequel-hurricanes to go home. Better to welcome them in and allow them to flood cinemas up to the expected box-office high water mark; then we may drain off what conclusions we can at summer's end. The most likely conclusions - I have already prepared two in anticipation - are as follows. The first is in three parts and has been formulated for those who believe in government intervention in cinema. A swingeing tax should be placed on all imported feature films, especially from America, so that the extra revenue can be ploughed into British film production. All summer holidays abroad should be cancelled or 'earned' in advance by a visit to 10 British cinemas in the week before departure. And major TV sport-watching should be hived off, as it soon will be anyway, to the satellite channels, where it will be watched only by the small if growing minority of persons willing to attach large saucers to their houses. This will free the remaining population to go to the movies. On the other hand, there are those like me who do not believe in government intervention. Our conclusion, also in three parts, is as follows. The British cinema should start to make good films again. The British cinema should stop sitting around waiting for the government and other bodies to pick it up off the floor. And the British cinema should remember that it once could - yes, it really could - make originals and sequel sagas all its own that struck gold at the box office. Remember the Bonds? The Carry Ons? The Hammer horrors? If we are going to be mugged by the movie business every summer - that now seems unavoidable - let us at least return to being mugged by our own movies. Who knows: in such profitable assaults on audiences whose resistance is lowered by the heat and holiday season might lie, at last, our industry's commercial salvation. In "My Cousin Vinny," half an idea for a film is searching earnestly for the other half. The half already in place concerns a fledgling Italian-American lawyer (Joe Pesci) who is summoned from Brooklyn to the Deep South to rescue a young cousin (Ralph Macchio) from an erroneous murder charge. Pesci sports a black wig and what I judge to be an emergency face-lift. His upper cheeks are pulled back so far that he resembles something out of "The Mikado." When he opens his mouth, we are astonished that he does not say things like 'Ah so, murder charge, velly mistaken.' Instead Pesci talks like someone out of "Goodfellas," which of course he is, and brings a touch of Cosa Nostra to the land of cotton. There are long passages of the film when even this limited joke runs out. During these, we must make do with minor pleasures like the scenery, the Southern accents and Fred Gwynne's mournfully cantankerous old judge, who seems to have stepped out of a Charles Addams cartoon and then found himself wishing he could step back in. But the bits and pieces never quite add up. Somewhere during this film's making I suspect that half the script was mysteriously lost down a street grating, leaving British director Jonathan Lynn, late of "Nuns On The Run," to vamp like hell somewhere south-west of Savannah. Nick Ward's "Dakota Road" is funnier than "My Cousin Vinny," though it is not meant to be. Since it is a low-budget British film co-funded by Channel Four, it has been treated with inordinate respect by magazines like "Time Out" ('painterly eye. . . sympathetic performances. . . subtle body language') and was even sat through with undue politeness by my colleagues at the Press show. This is as bad a film as I have ever seen. If Ingmar Bergman had been hired to script "The Archers" using only a Swedish- English phrasebook, he might have produced this crackpot pastoral about life, death, sex, God and pollution somewhere in the fenlands. Alan Howard creases a pained face as the local squire, while a supporting cast of unknowns wrestle with the portentous script. As if the dead fishes surveyed by the disillusioned local priest were not enough (fishes? Christian symbol? get it?), we have the sexually distraught young signalman manfully erecting his signal, the shame-ridden farmer's wife polishing her tile floors like a Lady Macbeth of the fens, and the incestuous, daughter-fancying, suicidally inclined farmer himself, who is forever polishing his shoes. No doubt he is hoping to go on a long, long journey. In the work of Luis Bunuel, symbolism is seldom allowed to lie around crudely exposed. It is either whisked on and off like a conjuror's rabbit or is elevated into fetishism. See "Belle De Jour," made in 1967 and revived this week. Surgeon's wife Catherine Deneuve embarks on her own brand of adult education course when she signs on for day work at a chic brothel. Soon it is open season for sexual fantasy - her own and her clients - and Bunuel adds to the subversiveness by filming the surreal as if it is real. Seeing human nature turned inside out as coolly as this is as shocking as discovering your favourite maiden aunt shooting up with heroin. See, learn, gasp and wonder. ----------------------------------------------------------- Bentley's Bedlam http://www.BetsyDa.com/bedlam.html This website is for information and entertainment purposes only and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.