![]() ![]() This film hit home and touched me so deeply on a personal level, its not even funny. But thanks also for a fascinating insight into fine character-making in a very enjoyable film. ![]() Whereas I can easily sympathise with the symptomatic causes underlying the nonentity of suburban life in gigantic cities, and therefore can easily feel for these people in Winterbottom's very welcome offering in this film, I can so easily again see why, when barely twenty, I took to my heels and left London for other pastures. The cast is splendid the performances are exactly right, natural, and thus so realistic there is no forced over-the-top stuff here. Set over the weekend on which the ever faithful and conservative British continue celebrating `Guy Fawkes Night' commemorating the attempted blowing up of the Houses of Parliament by said Guido Fawkes a few centuries ago, the film cleverly brings together ordinary Londoners at a particular moment which undoubtedly is crucial to each of them. Intertwining levels from the elderly couple, down through their daughters to the young grandson, all lends palpable reality to the price of living in the backdrops of a teeming faceless city. ![]() The characters are immediate and thus so real that you cannot but fail to be swept into the story. Here indeed is a richly rewarding 100-odd minutes of your time. One constantly thinks of the theatre playhouse element as the actors carry forward this sociological document, excellently choreographed by Michael Nyman´s music. But forget anything and everything you have seen of that type of film: `Wonderland' is totally in another sphere, with a well-constructed story of a long-weekend, magnificently natural performances and excellent dialogues. This is a beautiful film and I feel real gratitude to Michael Winterbottom for bringing our lives to the screen in such a way.Īlthough not classified as a film for TV, `Wonderland' is very much in the style of a production for that media, and indeed might even be classified as `soap-opera'. I guess you could say Winterbottom and Nyman do for London what Scorsese and Herrmann did for New York in Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. Though it may deal with the same sort of subject matter as Ken Loach or Mike Leigh, the style and approach are very different - the difference between a great piece of prose and a poem. While I've never been a big fan of the 'poetry of degradation' school of art, somehow the ugliness and squalor of South East London are transformed by this film and the lives of the characters are invested with real dignity. What lifts it above the sort of social realism common in British cinema is the cutting, the cinematography and Michael Nyman's lovely music, which must be his best work post-Greenaway. It's absolutely spot on about the kind of lives people around here lead and the way individuals and different social groups interact. The first thing is that it's filmed and set where I live, around the Elephant and Castle, as well as in Soho, and it's about the people I see every day. #Cinema verite wasteland 3 tvI caught this on TV without knowing who it was by and I was instantly captivated. ![]()
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