Gallic glamour shipwrecks on the inclement shores of Gormleigh's saucy postcard British smut. An exhilerating cinematic romp sees Tati, Godard, and Truffaut mercilessly replayed in the style of Carry On and Benny Hill, all to the accompaniment of the wistful spirit of composer Georges Delerue. Ken Russell's now notorious love of both cinematic art and wilful vulgarity declares itself in his first feature after TV as his unbridled genius explodes like a firework display, as the ambitious flares of his doomed Titanic talent was sunk by the iceberg of Anglo-Saxon critical disdain, and ignored by the S.S. Californian of British cultural inertia.
If he'd been the child of a more generous land and a sunnier clime, he'd have been as feted as a Fellini for the ripeness of this heady vintage. Surprisingly, in 1996 the Blackpool filmmaker Peter Chelsom succeeded, to some critical acclaim, in sparking desperate English seaside eccentricity with mercurial Gallicism in his 'Funny Bones.'
Ken Russell's mad caper celebrates the sad and seedy sexuality of grotesquely formal English satyrs and a vulgar and inflated misconception of Gallic glamour - literally in the insanely brilliant sequence of the destruction of the life-size promotional dolls announcing the arrival of the French sex-bomb at this English Cannes-In the-Rain, and that sequence of the top-hatted councilmen cavorting in Victorian bathing costumes like a clumsy male chorus line around an ersatz Bardot.
The whole spectacle is the wild fantasy of a repressed and gormless deckchair attendant, who imagines himself as the Entertainments Manager putting the decayed and old-fashioned seaside town of Gormleigh on the international cultural map - yet while he envisions a chic annual film festival with attendant foreign sex-goddess, Mr Mayor is caught feverishly winding the handles of ancient peepshow viewers for the stale titillations of past generations. The gulf between reality and fantasy provides at once the comedy and the tragedy of this end-of-the-pier show to end all end-of-the-pier shows.
Not polished as a performance, but certainly, like the brilliantly filmed opening cycle-ride of the busy deckchair attendant, a seat-of-the-pants ride of bewildering, breathless energy and reckless, plunging abandon. Then municipal and historical tableaux of the most stiff and stunning absurdity in their unconscious English parody of French history show us two nations united in mutual incomprehension, with clumsy farce their goofy child: Loving laughter can hide a grim despair, and Russell's misshapen movie expresses all his frustration and impatience with the uncongenial conditions of his own new cinematic career. The riotous dismantling of the cinema, as it is wildly enacted in one of the film's high points, reveals what was to become Ken Russell's signature bad boy attitude to the sclerotic British cultural establishment.
Ken was looked down on after he left the court of the BBC: But he is the serious Jester to our antic Lords, and the rebel against all the causes that betray us. He's even less likely to please in today's poisonous po-faced PC atmosphere, than he was to capture the affections of the superficial trendy swingers of the early sixties. Both are equally self-absorbed types.
This black-and-white film freezes out any technicolor psychedelia, and strips it's humanity naked and exposes it to the blast of the storm at the end, with the soaked and laughing principal trio emerging from the sea possibly as tragically as 'Jules et Jim' and their mutual love were drenched in their regrets even in the sunny South of France.
There is something hysterical and savage in what is on the surface this light souffle of tomfoolery, and this cartoonish universe is a satire on insouciance. Ken Russell as a director for the big screen was never taken seriously in Britain because he was always such an earnest filmmaker, and our dominant English sensibility resents barbed humour and unseemly enthusiasm, which embarasses it's cool reluctance to follow where the artist drives, and the critic's patronising attitude towards ambitious flights of imagination is to clip their wings, and bring the artist down to earth.
I like Russell's dangerous air of improvisation: To me, it makes his performance all the more thrilling, because he fully commits his imagination. His films are immediate and powerfully engaging. This long-neglected early gem is all of that. He just pours everything into his camera and then shakes it up: French Dressing.
If he'd been the child of a more generous land and a sunnier clime, he'd have been as feted as a Fellini for the ripeness of this heady vintage. Surprisingly, in 1996 the Blackpool filmmaker Peter Chelsom succeeded, to some critical acclaim, in sparking desperate English seaside eccentricity with mercurial Gallicism in his 'Funny Bones.'
Ken Russell's mad caper celebrates the sad and seedy sexuality of grotesquely formal English satyrs and a vulgar and inflated misconception of Gallic glamour - literally in the insanely brilliant sequence of the destruction of the life-size promotional dolls announcing the arrival of the French sex-bomb at this English Cannes-In the-Rain, and that sequence of the top-hatted councilmen cavorting in Victorian bathing costumes like a clumsy male chorus line around an ersatz Bardot.
The whole spectacle is the wild fantasy of a repressed and gormless deckchair attendant, who imagines himself as the Entertainments Manager putting the decayed and old-fashioned seaside town of Gormleigh on the international cultural map - yet while he envisions a chic annual film festival with attendant foreign sex-goddess, Mr Mayor is caught feverishly winding the handles of ancient peepshow viewers for the stale titillations of past generations. The gulf between reality and fantasy provides at once the comedy and the tragedy of this end-of-the-pier show to end all end-of-the-pier shows.
Not polished as a performance, but certainly, like the brilliantly filmed opening cycle-ride of the busy deckchair attendant, a seat-of-the-pants ride of bewildering, breathless energy and reckless, plunging abandon. Then municipal and historical tableaux of the most stiff and stunning absurdity in their unconscious English parody of French history show us two nations united in mutual incomprehension, with clumsy farce their goofy child: Loving laughter can hide a grim despair, and Russell's misshapen movie expresses all his frustration and impatience with the uncongenial conditions of his own new cinematic career. The riotous dismantling of the cinema, as it is wildly enacted in one of the film's high points, reveals what was to become Ken Russell's signature bad boy attitude to the sclerotic British cultural establishment.
Ken was looked down on after he left the court of the BBC: But he is the serious Jester to our antic Lords, and the rebel against all the causes that betray us. He's even less likely to please in today's poisonous po-faced PC atmosphere, than he was to capture the affections of the superficial trendy swingers of the early sixties. Both are equally self-absorbed types.
This black-and-white film freezes out any technicolor psychedelia, and strips it's humanity naked and exposes it to the blast of the storm at the end, with the soaked and laughing principal trio emerging from the sea possibly as tragically as 'Jules et Jim' and their mutual love were drenched in their regrets even in the sunny South of France.
There is something hysterical and savage in what is on the surface this light souffle of tomfoolery, and this cartoonish universe is a satire on insouciance. Ken Russell as a director for the big screen was never taken seriously in Britain because he was always such an earnest filmmaker, and our dominant English sensibility resents barbed humour and unseemly enthusiasm, which embarasses it's cool reluctance to follow where the artist drives, and the critic's patronising attitude towards ambitious flights of imagination is to clip their wings, and bring the artist down to earth.
I like Russell's dangerous air of improvisation: To me, it makes his performance all the more thrilling, because he fully commits his imagination. His films are immediate and powerfully engaging. This long-neglected early gem is all of that. He just pours everything into his camera and then shakes it up: French Dressing.