"Having a lovely time; wish you were here" is a phrase which in Britain has traditionally come to be associated with holiday postcards. (Whether anyone ever actually writes it is another matter). The use of "Wish You Were Here" as the title of this film reflects the fact that the action takes place in a South Coast English seaside town, although the characters are not holidaymakers but members of the town's resident population.
The story is set in the early 1950s. The main character is sixteen-year-old Lynda Mansell who lives with her widowed father Hubert, a hairdresser, and her younger sister Margaret. Lynda has left school- in the fifties the school-leaving age in Britain was still fifteen- but finds it difficult to hold down a job because of her rebellious and outspoken attitudes and her loose tongue. She loves to use vulgar language to shock people, her favourite insult being "Up yer bum". Actually, she rarely uses any expletives stronger than "bloody" or "bum", but in the fifties these words probably had a greater power to offend than they would today.
The film also deals Lynda's sexual development, charting her affairs with Dave, a young bus conductor, and Eric, a middle-aged friend of her father. Despite his working-class roots Dave affects an upper-class style and believes that wearing yellow pyjamas and using a cigarette holder make him a sophisticated lover. Things take an unexpected turn, however, when Lynda discovers that she is pregnant by Eric.
The title has a deeply ironic significance. Lynda's unnamed home town is not the sort of place where people have a lovely time. Few of the film's viewers, I suspect, have ever wished they were there. It is a stuffy, rigid and conformist place with stuffy, rigid and conformist inhabitants, of whom Hubert, obsessed with the idea that Lynda's misbehaviour might affect his social standing as a Freemason, is a prime example. At one point Lynda is told that she should be grateful to Hubert for not putting her and Margaret in a children's home when their mother died. A society in which it is considered acceptable to abandon one's children and refraining from doing so is regarded as an act of unwonted kindness is never going to be a society in which it is easy to be young.
In the late eighties and early nineties Emily Lloyd was regarded as a rising young star. Due to health issues she never really achieved the stardom which was predicted for her, making her one of the great might-have-beens of the British cinema. but her performance in this film, made when she was only sixteen herself, is a very fine one. (She received a BAFTA nomination). She makes Lynda, for all her rebellious behaviour, a surprisingly sympathetic figure. In the context of the film, this behaviour seems less like juvenile delinquency than like a breath of fresh air coming to blow away the suffocating smog of middle-class (and working-class) conventionality and self-righteousness in which the town is enveloped.
The rather episodic plot of "Wish You Were Here" is not a particularly strong one, which is why the film does not get a higher mark, but Lloyd's sparkling performance is enough to make it still worth watching more than thirty years on. 7/10
The story is set in the early 1950s. The main character is sixteen-year-old Lynda Mansell who lives with her widowed father Hubert, a hairdresser, and her younger sister Margaret. Lynda has left school- in the fifties the school-leaving age in Britain was still fifteen- but finds it difficult to hold down a job because of her rebellious and outspoken attitudes and her loose tongue. She loves to use vulgar language to shock people, her favourite insult being "Up yer bum". Actually, she rarely uses any expletives stronger than "bloody" or "bum", but in the fifties these words probably had a greater power to offend than they would today.
The film also deals Lynda's sexual development, charting her affairs with Dave, a young bus conductor, and Eric, a middle-aged friend of her father. Despite his working-class roots Dave affects an upper-class style and believes that wearing yellow pyjamas and using a cigarette holder make him a sophisticated lover. Things take an unexpected turn, however, when Lynda discovers that she is pregnant by Eric.
The title has a deeply ironic significance. Lynda's unnamed home town is not the sort of place where people have a lovely time. Few of the film's viewers, I suspect, have ever wished they were there. It is a stuffy, rigid and conformist place with stuffy, rigid and conformist inhabitants, of whom Hubert, obsessed with the idea that Lynda's misbehaviour might affect his social standing as a Freemason, is a prime example. At one point Lynda is told that she should be grateful to Hubert for not putting her and Margaret in a children's home when their mother died. A society in which it is considered acceptable to abandon one's children and refraining from doing so is regarded as an act of unwonted kindness is never going to be a society in which it is easy to be young.
In the late eighties and early nineties Emily Lloyd was regarded as a rising young star. Due to health issues she never really achieved the stardom which was predicted for her, making her one of the great might-have-beens of the British cinema. but her performance in this film, made when she was only sixteen herself, is a very fine one. (She received a BAFTA nomination). She makes Lynda, for all her rebellious behaviour, a surprisingly sympathetic figure. In the context of the film, this behaviour seems less like juvenile delinquency than like a breath of fresh air coming to blow away the suffocating smog of middle-class (and working-class) conventionality and self-righteousness in which the town is enveloped.
The rather episodic plot of "Wish You Were Here" is not a particularly strong one, which is why the film does not get a higher mark, but Lloyd's sparkling performance is enough to make it still worth watching more than thirty years on. 7/10