Absolute Beginners (1986) +

An enthralling, if confounding, pastiche of a musical film. The film ostensibly tells the story of a pair lovers -- the boy a photographer, the girl a fashion designer -- and their estrangement from each other (as well as their sustaining community of outsiders) in the Notting Hill district of London in the summer months just prior to the legendary Notting Hill Riots of 1958. The film is both about this period of cultural and racial transformation in post-WWII Britain even as it is also an excavation of the anxieties of authenticity in post-punk/big80s Britain. The film riffs off every musical you might imagine: from the teenybopper rock films to Tommy to Rocky Horror to West Side Story to Michael Jackson/Madonna to the most baroque of MGM musical production designs of the 1950s. What I admired about the film though, and what sustained me through its often numbing obtuseness, was director Julien Temple's searching inquisitiveness -- the film is about the characters, about the music, about the history, about the film's contemporary moment but even more than all of that this film seems to be about the perilous adventure of making a film in the first place. In discussions of 1980s postmodernism and pastiche over the last 15 years or so, it seems the conversations too readily lapse toward the an interest in irony, especially the notion of ironic certainty as a subject position for the either artist/auteur or audience/auteur. Yet I'm reminded how that television theory book Channels of Discourse used Pee-Wee's Playhouse as its example lesson of post-modernism. And though there was much irony in all of Pee-Wee, there was -- especially in the tv show and first film -- a great deal of sincerity. And this is the aspect of postmodern pastiche that I think often gets forgotten: the reassemblage and referentiality in these pastiche productions derive as much from appreciation as it does from derision. I admired this tension in Temple's film -- there is a sincerity to the production that doesn't diminish the archness of his commentary. And this is the complexity of postmodernism that sometimes, it seems to me, gets overlooked. The film is a fascinating (and possibly failed, I'm not sure) experiment that I appreciated more and more as the film wore on. Yes, I was relieved to see it end, but even then I was stunned by the hopefulness of the its basically cynical conclusion. This, it seems to me, was the aspiration of post-modernism, to deconstruct familiar forms so that an audience's habituated reactions might be challenged and transformed. And this, interestingly enough, is what Temple's film accomplishes. I don't know that I'd recommend it, nor would I necessarily seek out an occasion to screen it again, but I do admire and appreciate the film, both as a time-capsule of a very brief moment in mainstream media production and also as a fundamentally aspirational piece of cinema-making. Temple's trying something here (just look at the care/attention to production design and choreography), something substantial and something worthwhile, and it's worth noting. Finally, I think it's important to note Temple's insistence on including queers in his vision of an urban utopia -- remember, in 1986, it was still fairly unusual to explicitly (and affirmatively) include fags/dykes in cinematic microcosms, let alone underscore queer instrumentality in sustaining diverse community. Yes, Big Jill is played in drag queen style instead of as a bulldyke, but still. I don't know. I liked this film, a lot I think, for reasons I don't entirely understand.