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 In cinemas now [PG]
Director: Gurinder Chadha
Runtime: 101mins
Being over twice the age of the target market of the film you’re meant to be reviewing makes for an interesting experience. Do you attempt to look at the film with the eyes of a 14 year-old (that’s if you even know any 14 year-olds as a basis to emulate…), or do you wade in like a cynical old film buff with half a dozen Tarkovsky DVDs in your collection, and lay waste to the movie like any old codger would be expected to? Hmm…
Angus, Thongs & Perfect Snogging is unashamedly a film for teenage girls – based on diary-style young adult novels by Louise Rennison, it’s a Bridget Jones Diary minus any suggestion of sex (although it does have some big knickers), and while that might sound like a nightmare to any sophisticated filmgoers, there’s actually quite a lot to be enjoyed here.
Centred around 14 year-old Georgia (Georgia Groome), a girl living in the British seaside town of Eastbourne, the film light-heartedly follows her trials and tribulations with boys, dorky parents (including Alan ‘Jonathan Creek’ Davies), and plans for an epic fifteeth birthday party. We first meet Georgia dressed as a giant cocktail olive, attending a party where, unbeknownst to her, her friends have opted out of a planned hors d’ouvres theme in favour of party frocks. Yes, it’s embarrassment number one, and there’s plenty more to come. When Georgia spies a ‘sex god’ new boy at school – Robbie (Aaron Johnson), bassplayer in ‘The Stiff Dylans’ – it’s on for young and … well, young. Kissing must be perfected (in a funny scene involving a Hugh Grant-obsessed snogging coach from Georgia’s year), thong-wearing blonde girlfriends must be gotten rid of, and the correct way to use fake tanning products must be learnt.
(And who’s Angus, you might ask at this point? He’s Georgia’s ‘half Scottish wildcat’, and spends most of the film being dressed in undignified costumes by Georgia’s little sister – who looks like a tiny Bjork. Really, that’s it.)
Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha took time out from a big screen adaptation of TV’s Dallas to make this film, and it looks like she thoroughly enjoyed it – the locations look wonderful, Groome is suitably silly and clever, and the remaining performances are mostly endearing (two exceptions being Eleanor Tomlinson as Georgia’s BFF Jas, a googly-eyed and annoying Keira Knightley substitute; and Aaron Johnson – whose acting abilities are in inverse proportion to his looks). A very hip soundtrack – Stiff Dylans’ massacre of the Buzzcocks’ Ever Fallen In Love aside – helps keep the pace high, and the injection of post-Juno teenspeak keeps it current – that is, provided British teens speak that way. Don’t they all carry knives these days?
The only real complaint this codger has, is with the ending. Three minutes after the film begins you know this isn’t an exercise in British Social Realism, but the wildly over-the-top wish fulfilment ending is so chokingly saccharine, any drama that did exist in the film is rendered completely inert. Reality is kicked so far out the window it ends up in France, and you feel like you’ve just watched a dream sequence rather than the climax to a film that had been, until that point, quirky and funny enough to be believable.
That aside, it’s fun and easy viewing. Just don’t go in expecting Love, Actually or Judd Apatow-style gags and you’ll be OK … as much as you can be without being female and under 20, which is the only real way to avoid suspicious looks from cinema ushers.
***
TOPHER HEALY
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