If anyone needs a 'feel good' film to see this summer, Beautiful Thing should be top of the list.
Adapted from the successful stage play, it is a story of two young lads falling in love during a long summer heat wave. The backdrop to all this is the very unlikely romantic setting of Thamesmead Estate in south east London.
It features truanting, school exclusions, bullying, single parents and violent abuse, but it is far from a depressing tale.
Jamie, Ste and Lech are all neighbours. Lech, excluded from school, spends her days getting more and more obsessed with impersonating Mama Cass, trading insults and winding everyone upsomeone with serious attitude! Stepopular and sporty at schoollives with his drunken and abusive father and drug dealing brother. Jamie, who is bullied at school, lives with his mother and has to put up with her dozy hippy boyfriend trying to 'bond' with him. His mother, Sandra, is a barmaid hoping to get a pub of her own so as to escape the estate.
One night, following one of the regular beatings from his brother, Ste seeks refuge next door and Sandra arranges for him to sleep 'top to toe' in Jamie's bed. So the faltering beginnings of their relationship start.
While the film is light-hearted and funny it deals very well with a serious subject. While Ste, fearful, stumbles through coming to terms with his sexuality, Jamie has less problems admitting to himself how he feels. But when Jamie's mum finds out by following them to a gay bar, her reactions are a realistic mixture of anger, support and love.
Jonathan Harvey wrote the original script for Beautiful Thing, aged 24, while teaching in a school on Thamesmead. With the screen version able to reach a wider audience, it has allowed him to challenge some long held sexual stereotypes. 'I had to explain to the actors that certainly with me and my friends, there wasn't much of a crisis about being gay, it was just natural to us. Beautiful Thing reflects this, is a happy story, you can be gay and happy, you can be working class and accept homosexuality.'
The script is peppered with language you would come across outside any secondary schoolslapper, slag, bird, etcbut the film deals with this in a funny way rather than moralistically.
If you don't like, or can't remember, the Mamas and the Papas, that will change after the film. The soundtrack, while seeming an unlikely backing to a film about 1990s teenagers, fits the mood of the film perfectly.
The film is billed as an 'urban fairy tale' and has a fairy tale rainbow straddling the tower blocks in the opening scenes, yet this film is anything but corny. A beautiful, sensitive film that will have you smiling as you leave the cinema.
Phoebe Watkins
On the surface, From Dusk Till Dawn seems to have little going for it. It has Quentin Tarantino in a major acting rolea fact that makes you feel this is going to be a disaster moviewith men in black suits looking mean and discharging hand held cannons in seedy bars.
But surface appearances aren't everything, because although the first 20 minutes of this movie seem to bear out your worst fear that this will be Reservoir Dogs revisited, the last 30 minutes more than make up for it as the film descends into mayhem and chaos without parallel.
The movie centres on two characters, Richard and Seth Gecko (Tarantino and George Clooney of ER fame). Both are bank robbers and killersin short, 'mean motorscooters'. However, Richard Gecko is a killer with a twisthe takes pleasure in it. They hijack a motorola home owned by a priest with shaky faith (Harvey Keitel) in an attempt to get through the Mexican border and evade the police. The plan is to meet up with their compadres in Mexico and in the process dump the reverend and his two childrenplayed by Juliette Lewis and Ernest Liu, who both put in excellent performances.
So far, so good. But the bar they choose to rendezvous in rapidly changes as all the punters (mostly bikers who can disappear without trace) become the main course for the vampires who run the establishment. The film then totally transforms into a kaleidoscope of different film genreshorror, comedy and just plain science fiction. These different aspects of the film are not thrown together but combined in a way that makes it both unique and funny.
Although the last 30 minutes of this film are excellent, there is a profound problem with it that mars it appreciably. There is a horrific strain of sexism through the film that at times becomes nauseous and makes you feel you have descended into the seventh circle of Beavis and Butthead hell. Not even the relatively strong independent role Juliette Lewis plays can offset this.
However, for all of this, the film must count as the ultimate escapist movie, which defies categoryit is a mishmash of every major film type from Easy Rider through to Hammer House of Horror to Reservoir Dogs. A good watch, if only for the last half hour.
Gaverne Bennett
The exhibition guide reads more like a London bus route than art gallery bumf:
Bethnal Green, Ridley Road market, Mornington Crescent, Willesden Green. Leon Kossoff loves London.
In fact London and some of its inhabitants are Kossoff's only theme. Kossoff was born in the East End within sight of St Paul's Cathedral to Russian Jewish parents in 1926 and has lived and worked in Londonapart from evacuation and National Serviceever since.
His early work centres largely on bomb sites and building sites of the 1950s. It was during this period that Kossoff consolidated his method of working which he had been developing along with contemporaries like Frank Auerbach since their days at St Martin's School of Art, the Royal College and Borough Polytechnic. They went on to form a loose association known as the London Group.
Before starting on a painting, Kossoff makes numerous searching charcoal drawings. He then embarks on the painting, though painting is almost the wrong word to describe Kossoff's work. These paintings are at least some of the way towards being sculpture. Thick layers of paint are manhandled, dragged, dribbled and caked onto the surface by the handful. The image is composed as much of deep furrows and ridges as it is of colour and tone, and Kossoff works on the paint as much with his hands as he does with the paint brushes. The result is a three dimensional work which does not confine itself to the two dimensional 'picture plane'.
His approach is painstaking and time consuming. He often scrapes the painting down and starts from the beginning when the work is in an advanced state and then builds the layers of paint up again. It is as if he were trying to find the hidden essence not just of his subject, but also of his own response to it buried somewhere in the physicality of the mass of paint. It is a process which resembles in reverse the way that some sculptors talk of chipping away at a block of stone or wood to reveal what the artist feels to be there already in some mysterious way. As Kossoff has said, 'The subject person or landscape reverberates in my head unleashing a compelling need to destroy and restate.' The early works convey an overwhelmingly bleak, almost catastrophic, feeling in some of the paintings. Kossoff has mixed grit with the paint so that the artwork is literally composed of its subject. The colours are dark, muted and muddy. It seems postwar London really was the dreary monochrome place the old films suggest. The paintings also reflect the turmoil and dislocation caused by the postwar reconstruction of the capital.
Kossoff painted members of his family and a number of close friends. These works are very like the landscapes in that their subject is not immediately apparent and only seems to emerge with fairly careful scrutiny.
As Kossoff matures a lot of the gloom of his earlier work seems to liftthough the paintings can hardly be called jolly. A broader palate is introduced with lighter, softer tones which give the work a more optimistic feeling.
These paintings are still battlegrounds but more humorous and populated. The cold blue of an evening sky in winter in his painting of York Way, King's Cross, marks a dramatic shift in his work, and is terribly evocative of the huge sullen city.
His paintings are concerned with personalising and humanising the gritty modern city, and many of the scenes focus on the domestic with people going about their ordinary activities unselfconsciously. They tend to look hurried and oppressed by their surroundings, though there is also a certain defiance or at least resilience about them.
The paintings of Willesden sports centre, made when Kossoff took his son there to learn to swim, are another dramatic turning point in his work, but they continue the trend towards airier and more colourful paintings. They are astonishingly atmospheric and you can almost hear the shouts and splashes of people enjoying a respite from the hard city that Kossoff loves. It is this revelation of the extraordinary in the ordinary and the human in the mundane which is at the heart of Kossoff's work.
His portraits and nudes have this same quality of the durability of the human spirit. The struggle that Kossoff has with the paint somehow seems to reflect the personal struggles, whatever they may be, of his sitters. The way the figure has to fight its way out of the thick swirls of paint suggests the struggle to maintain the human spirit in the face of the alienating modern city.
Of his most recent work, the paintings of Embankment tube station are among the most striking. Crowds and a flower stall make these his most colourful paintings. They are, however, violently rendered and like his other work both disturbing and reassuring at the same time. His paintings are not happy but they are humorous and powerful.
Kossoff has said, 'London seems to be in my blood', but this is not the London of Buckingham Palace and Beefeaters or of 'top people' and politicians. It is what could be called 'real' London and, if you take the bus to the exhibition, the journey home will present you with a stranger but more intriguing London.
Tim Sanders
The Leon Kossoff Retrospective is at the Tate Gallery, London, until 1 September