Cinema

Rip It Up, Issue 178, 1 May 1992, Page 36

Cinema

YOUNG SOUL REBELS Director: Isaac Julien

This is the first feature from young black British director Julien, whose marvellous Looking for Langston was coupled with Marlon Rigg's Tongues Untied at the 1990 International Film Festival. Rebels is a tale of two soul enthusiastics (a cool Mo Sesay and an irrepressibly bubblesome Valentine Nonyela) who run an amateur radio station from the back of a garage — playing the classic tracks from Parliament, Funkadelic and Roy Ayers that give the film so much of its . atmosphere. As a hip love story there's an artless charm to the way Julien plots parallel romances between Nonyela and an engaging secretary from Metropolitan Radio (Sophie Oknedo); and Sesay and a young punk man (Jason Durr). However, a brutal park murder at the beginning of the film suggests that a thriller might be expected — a promise that is only fulfilled in the last 15 minutes of the film. But it's too late to crank up the plot— and then only to reveal a melodramatically homophobic killer is behind it all. The delights of Young Soul Rebels, apart from its soundtrack, lie in the period details. Just as Julien evoked 20s Harlem perfectly for Looking for ~ Langston, here he does the same for 1977 London, the Jubilee Year with the city in the high flush of Punk. Billbud's bedroom is a noisy riot of punk trivia and a Jubilee street stall is positively dripping with kitsch collectables. Art director Debra Overton deserves star billing. : • :> WILLIAM DART HOWARD'S END Director: Janies Ivory Howard's End is one of E.M. Forster's toughest dissections of Edwardian English society and the novel has provided James Ivory with his most successful Forster adaptation to date. Where Room With A View and Maurice were respectively cute and sentimental, Howard's End melds the brittle and poetic by turns, with the oppressive, corrupt society never far away. This is a heartless,

male-dominated world in which Anthony Hopkins covers his face with shame when he can't repress his sobbing. Sam West's young clerk, Leonard Bast is brutally murdered for no more than impregnating an only too willing Helena Bonham Carter. So many images linger—Vanessa Redgrave wading through long grass in an Edwardian gown, a bevy of umbrellas waxing balletic to Beethoven's Fifth. Even daring touches, like two crucial confrontations broken up into self-consciously short and self-contained scenes, are held together by Ivory's firm directorial control. My only irritation (and it was momentary) was when Richard Robbins's score turned minimalist during one of the train journeys to Howard's End.

And what performances! Vanessa Redgrave is achingly poignant as Ruth Wilcox. Emma Thompson dispenses just the right degree of crispness as Margaret Schlegel and Carter is inspired as her headstrong sister Helen. And as for Anthony Hopkins as Henry Wilcox, it's difficult to believe he was ever Hannibal Lecter. WILLIAM DART

MY GIRL Director: Howard Zieff

1992 screens are having more than their share of precocious

American kiddies. If you warmed to midget masterminds by the mini-van full in Little Man Tate then you might be tempted by this terminally twee tale of growing up in small-town America.

Eleven-year-old Anna Chumsky introduces herself by announcing how she got haemorrhoids off a bustop toilet seat and from then on it's clear that we're supposed to find this, and every bon mot that drops form her pouting lips, terribly cute. Playmate Macauley Culkin's performance, by comparison, is the model of restraint and the child

doesn't deserve the death by beesting, which provides the climax of the film.

And the young do not have a monopoly on cuteness. There's a cutesy-pie bingo evening for the old

folks and Chumsky's grandmother, silent for most of the film, occasionally breaks into stentorian torch song — most amusing when she intrudes on a funeral service

bellowing out 'One For My Bab/. What might the great Preson Sturgess have made of this material, with characters rejoicing in names like Harry Sultenfuss, Shelly DeVoot and Dr Welty? But no, it was not to be. A distinctly paunchy Dan

Ackroyd is a glum representative of the early middle-aged set and Jamie Lee Curtis struggles valiantly with a part that might have been made

with Goldie Hawn in mind. Still, ifs the rangy Curtis, in miniskirt and matching vanity case, that provides the film with some of its more amusing moments. WILLIAM DART