再England in 60s and 70s, April 11th 2009 P51. 映画に見る英国の６０年代、 ７０年代
In the 1960s women wore miniskirts and men sported dizzying shirts and Lennonesque circular glasses. People took drugs, had jaunty sex with strangers and listened to rock'n'roll；the few who didn't were mostly government killjoys with Hitlerite moustaches. Everyone gadded about in Volkswagen camper-vans. There was a lot of parquet and purple. In the 1970s people drank and smoked incessantly, even during football training. The wallpaper was awful. The cars were boxy and hair was rampant. More or less everything was brown. Those are the familiar impressions relayed by two new British films. ゛The Boat That Rocked゛is set in 1966, aboard a pirate radio station that flouted the BBC's broadcasting monopoly from a boat in the North Sea. ゛The Damned United゛dramatises the short, unhappy tenure of Brian Clough, a volatile football manager, at Leeds United, then England's top club, in 1974. Both are tales of rebellious underdogs and male friendship. But they are otherwise very different. Taken together, the films, and the critical response to them, emcapsulate the ways in which Britain imagine its past, and hint at the country's current mood. Excluding perennial costume dramas, a rash of shoddy cockney gangster flicks and anti-colonial American blockbusters, in the past decade or so Britain has appeared on film in two main guises. One is as a soft-focus Arcadia of affuence and apolitical contentment, where it is almost always either sunny or snowing, falling in and out of love is the main pastime and everyone has great hair. This Britain is designed to gratify a British audience and beguile Americans；it is self-delusion masquerading as self-deprecation. Its main exponent is Richard Curtis, the ゛romcom゛maestro behind ゛Four Weddings and a Funeral゛and other saccharine distractions (though Woody Allen has tried to muscle in). Mr Curtis directed ゛The Boat That Rocked゛and, in a way, the 1960s are a natural decade for him to fix on. Apart from the miniskirts, Britain in the 1960s produced the Beatles, James Bond, the Profumo scandal and a decent riot outside the American embassy. But it was not so widely convulsed as was America or much of Europe. In popular memory, Britain's '60s are more titillating than traumatic；more Mary Quant than Gloria Steinem. The 1970s, in which ゛The Damned United゛is set, were less glamorous but perhaps more scarring. Besides the upholstery, they are remembered for class war and economic meltdown；for three-day week and the IMF bail-out；for picket lines, racial tension and violence in Northern Ireland and at football grounds. Other than sartorially, the '70s weren't funny. They are the perfect setting for the other main vision of Britain that the cinema tends to offer. If Mr Curtis's films are a form of self-delusion, this genre is a kind of self-flagellation. It is a realism focused on addicts, criminals and other desperadoes, set on housing estates and patches of waste ground where it is usually raining. Its main practitioners are Ken Loach and, less polemically, Mike Leigh and Shane Meadows. ゛Red Riding゛, a trilogy of coruscating films in this mould, based on novels by David Peace and set partly in the 1970s, recently aired on Channel 4. Mr Peace also wrote the novel of ゛The Damned United゛, which like ゛Red Riding゛sometimes imbues its drab surroundings with a certain melancholic grandeur. The adaptation also works in a redemptive romamticism, which sets it in the sub-tradition of British films that depict working-class grime but contrive happy endings. But it is nevertheless a story of unmanaged emotions, primitive masculinity and failure. The biggest difference between ゛The Damned United゛ and ゛The Boat That Rocked゛may be that ゛The Damned゛is quietly affecting whereas ゛The Boat゛is lamentable. Never can so many fine actors have generated so little pleasure (Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Philip Seymour Hoffman and several other luminaries are all sunk in Mr Curtis's rustbucket). It is unfunny and misogynistic. By contrast, in its portrayal of introverted male rivalries and relationships, ゛The Damned United゛describes male chauvinism without actively promoting it. ゛The Boat゛has been duly excoriated by critics and ゛The Damned゛mostly admired. These responses, however, may reveal something about Britain's evolving tastes as well as about the films' intrinsic quality. A country's artistic preferences are not fixed；neither are its attitudes to it past, which fluctuate with the perspectives of the precent. It may be that, in 2009, Britain's appetite for fluffy national pastiche has waned. And perhaps the 1960s hedonism and puerile individualism that ゛The Boat゛celebrates seem, in the post-credit-crunch world, more flippant than heroic. The 1970s, on the other hand, with their volatility and humiliation, have come to seem more relevant, almost a kindred decade (though the fact that much of what is now the cultural establishment grew up then may also be a factor in their salience). The ultimate message of ゛The Da
