Film

Rip It Up, Issue 95, 1 June 1985, Page 34

Film

A PRIVATE FUNCTION Director: Malcolm Mowbray In 1984 Alan Bennett's witty and stylish An Englishman Abroad was one of the highlights of the television year and I’m willing to bet that A Private Function will prove one of the best films of 1985. On the big screen Bennett gives us a rather barbed slice-of-life in a post-War Yorkshire town, setting his comedy of class struggle against a forthcoming civic dinner to celebrate the 1947 royal wedding. Most of the mischief and machinations revolve around the furtive rearing of an unlicensed pig, "Betty'; who will provide the main fare for the banquet. Bennett’s script is tight and sharply focused on its satiric targets. It encompasses a wide range of humour, from the understated and affable bumbling around of Michael Palm’s chiropodist to the broadly scatalogical play made on the animal’s continence problems. The more boldly conceived characters register vividly, in particular Maggie Smith’s local piano teacher and chiropodist’s wife, with her constant yearnings for “the better things of life” and Denholm Elliot’s oleaginous doctor who is equally determined to maintain his control of the town’s social hierarchy. Perhaps, in the final count, a few things don’t work the intended

parallels between the pig and Richard Griffith’s distinctly porcine Allardyce seem a little heavyhanded. By contrast, Bennett's script gives Smith's senile mother a broadness that is almost Dickensian. It seems very appropriate to evoke the name of the Victorian novellist, for A Private Function is very much a comedy of character and, as such, is written with a good deal of edge and perception. The star is indubitably Maggie Smith, whether launching into Elgarian strains on the parlour piano under the influence of a few too many sherrys, shrieking "Da Capo Veronica!” to divert the attentions of a piano pupil or becoming a North Country Lady Macbeth, goading her husband into slaughtering the pig in the bathroom.

BODY DOUBLE Brian De Palma Body Double has caused as much controversy as the director’s earlier Dressed To Kill, with its unsettling mixture of sexism and violence. Certainly, the murder of Deborah Shelton with an electric drill does come across as excessively sadistic, especially when a carefully set up camera angle shows the drill emerging from between the victim's thighs like a giant phallus. Yet Body Double is very much keyed into the vicariousness that runs through our modern society, coupled with our reluctance and/or inability to make decisions and act upon them. If De Palma’s film seems cynical then it must be seen as a reflection of the more general social malaise, an attitude relfected in the short extract from the video of Frakie Goes To Hollywood’s 'Relax! It is a critique, not a celebration and what could be a singularly bleak vision is offset by the dashes of offbeat humour and fresh unaffected performances by both Craig Wasson and Melanie Griffith. The publicity for Body Double describes De Palma as’’the modern master of suspense” and there are many echoes of Hitchcock: the central voyeurism theme recalls Rear Window and Wasson’s obsession with Shelton parallels that of James Stewart wwith Kim Novak in Vertigo. In Body Double the hero's fatal flaw is his claustrophobia rather than the fear of heights which plagued Stewart. Body Double also surveys the quirky details of latter-day LA with a Hitchcockian eye for the bi7arre,

from Beverley Hills lingerie boutiques to the outer limits of porno sleaze. BIRDY Director: Alan Parker Alan Parker’s new film is built on what might seem an unlikely premise: a young man (Matthew Modine) who takes on the personality of a bird, eventually retreating into his own silent escape world in a military hospital. The action of Birdy is divided between Modine’s and Nicholas Cage's teenage years in Brooklyn and their meeting years later in the hospital. In between came the Vietnam War, in which both had seen combat. As Cage’s character remarks bitterly at one point in the film, “In any other war we’d be heroes.” Not only does the Vietnam issue ensure that the film deals with a world of contemporary realities, but Birdy' s treatment of the Man/Bird theme is not as literary as Peter Shaffer’s Equus, nor as surreal as Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud. The film’s more poetic flights of fancy are shrewdly balanced by the earthy humour of the flashback sequences, many of which are livened by Sandy Baron's irrascible Jewish/ltalian poppa. Birdy is, above all, a study in the strength of friendship and loyalty in much the same way as Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields. This is as much the core of the film as Birdy’s quest for flight and the freedom which it enables. William Dart