Absolute Beginners
                                                                                                         
Director: Julien Temple
Year: 1986
Rating: 7.0
This is more a 110-minute musical video than a film but it is a splendid concoction and explosion of music, color, style, excess, movement and dance all thrown together with imagination and verve. It may not be a very good film if you judge it on narration, drama and acting but it is a heck of a video. Not too surprising really in that it is directed by Julien Temple who at the time was a big deal music video director for such artists as the Sex Pistols, Stray Cats, the Kinks, Depeche Mode, The Beat, Rolling Stones, Sade and David Bowie. A few who would agree to be in this film. But not a lot of any feature film experience. Still, he managed to talk a fairly new film company named Goldcrest into producing this film. It sort of bombed at the box office and reviews were mixed and it disappeared from the public consciousness, but I vaguely recalled going to see this and have been wanting to take another look. Think of it as a Westside Story set in 1958 London when jazz, rock & roll, the beat generation and diversity were all crashing into one another. London was not yet the swinging hip capitol of the world that it would become but it was on the edge.



In an early scene it has one of those continuous tracking shots that wet dreams are made of as the camera follows Colin (Eddie O'Connell) through the streets of Soho as he makes his ways past the Mods, punks, wankers  skivs, musicians, party girls that are carousing on the streets. There isn't much of a story here though later it takes on racial issues and white supremacy. Before that Colin is in love with Suzette (Patsy Kensit) a clothes designer with ambitions that don't include a street photographer. She turns to her boss (James Fox) to climb the ladder. Colin is tempted by an entrepreneur with no soul - played by Bowie - to use his talents for making money. Then the final 20-minutes is an amazing set-piece when white Nazis run by an Enoch Powell type character go on a rampage of beating up blacks and burning their houses down. All to music and at some point, it turns into a dance ensemble as the whites and blacks face off against each other.



Nearly all of it is to music and movement - there are some 22 songs credited - it was made into a two-disc album - and much of it is terrific. A few standouts are Ray Davies singing The Quiet Life as everything around him in his home is chaos, Bowie sings the title song which is great and another one in which he is on a giant typewriter, Style Council has a song and then the fabulous Sade appears in a bright turquoise colored gown on stage to sing Killer Blow. It is basically a series of music videos strung together with a few breaks and none of it feels real or essential but there are some stunningly beautiful and inventive moments.