FILM

Rip It Up, Issue 124, 1 November 1987, Page 43

FILM

PERSONAL SERVICES Director: Terry Jones I’d seen the trailer a number of times, with Terry Jones doing his wink-and-nudge act and Julie Walters preening herself in a skin-tight jumpsuit. With the director’s Monty Python background and associations, there seemed good reason for looking forward to his new film, loosely based on the career of Madam Cyn, one of the most celebrated London madams of the 70s. It’s a promising subject—a chance to look at the phenomenon of AngloSaxon puritanism as well as the sexual politics implicit in the “oldest profession.” Unfortunately, this is a challenge that Jones doesn’t really manage to meet. A running banter of smutty dialogue soon becomes tiresome and Personal Services isn’t much of an advance on the old Carry On films in this department. The deeper political issue is one that is barely addressed, although it is touched on in a few scenes. .

One is an amazing confrontation between Walters and her father in a field after her sister’s wedding, a scene in which Walters reveals the deep-rooted bitterness at the heart of thei relationship. In a neat directorial touch, Jones uses longish takes with a telling waver of hand-held camera at a climactic point. The other instance is much more crudely manipulated. This is the final scene in which a smirking Walters faces a courtroom made up entirely, from judge to jury, of her past customers.

It is strange too that the relationship between Julie Walters and her son, whose very existence seems symbolic of her self-resolution and independence, is hardly developed at all. But even in a film which has so many flagrantly ignored opportunities, there are some memorable moments: Shirley Stelfox’s crackling performance as Walters’s more experienced friend, running through a gamut of characters from “matron” to “lesbian schoolgirl” in the course of her work, and an amusingly deadpan performance by Danny Schiller as Dolly, a Dandy Nichols in drag. William Dart GOTHIC Director: Ken Russell “It is an age of dreams and nightmares and we are merely the children of the age,” intones Gabriel Byrne’s Lord Byron to his party guests as they stage their own Walpurgisnacht in a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva. In his first film since Crimes of Passion, Russell returns to the sensationalistic rewriting of history that made his name back in the late 60s. Byron then is ringmaster in this psychological circus, as Shelley, Mary Godwin, her half-sister, and Doctor John Polidari —with the aid of alcohol, laudanum and the odd seance or two

— live out their fantasies, creating the ferment that would give birth to two classic Gothic novels, Polidari’s The Vampire and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. With much running through ancestral corridors, billowing drapery, and twitches of madness, the scene is set — something like an Evil Dead Part 2 with literary pretensions. There’s an alarming inconsistency to the tone of Russell’s new film. There are inspired moments, such as the striking use of mechanical lifesize dolls at various points in the movie, but there are also too many special effects that seemed to have strayed in from your average video nasty (assorted monsters, as well as a scene in which a ghost’s helmet is pulled up to reveal a face full of seething worms). His players are nothing if not energetic, especially Myriam Cyr’s Claire, and Timothy Spall from Auf Wiedersehen Pet tackles the role of Polidari with a relish worth of Max Adrian.

But this is not enough in the final count. The material is possibly too fragile for sustaining as a film, and Russell’s conclusion, with presentday tourists milling around the villa, and the director providing the biographical wind-up on the characters, seems to admit this.

William Dart