For a film that was designed to and hyped as the savior of the much-troubled British film industry through international success, ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS is hampered from a setting and premise that is, for lack of a better description, too British. Anyone not familiar with late-1950s British sociopolitics, the post-WW2 rise of far-right and neo-fascist groups, the differing subculture of the period and their influence on musical and broader popular culture is bound to feel like they're being dragged along through an exhilarating ride through an alien world with no time to catch your breath.
It's a series of breathtakingly-choreographed and staged music videos strung together by the thinnest of plots, with things happening for seemingly no logical rhyme or reason except to show the audience something cool and expensive. And believe me, it is all very cool and very expensive. But the absence of strong leads in either Eddie O'Connell or Patsy Kensit and a definite directorial philosophy of "style over substance" that manifests itself as movie "things happen just because". A 14-year old con artist that goes from bubblegum pop merchandise hawker, to pimp, to white supremacist? There's that. David Bowie as an advertising executive-nee-corrupt real estate developer using said white supremacists to force minority tenants out of a future gentrification zone, whose accent oscillates wildly between dialect and continent? This film's got you covered. Bruce Payne screaming the lyrics "Great Balls of Fire" while pounding on a flaming piano? Don't know why or how you'd want that, but this movie certainly delivers. ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS is a film of set-pieces and expensive showcases but little else, intended to envoke some deep sense of nostalgia for a period that most contemporary audience will be completely alien to. It's a film that just sort of exists because it does.
It's a series of breathtakingly-choreographed and staged music videos strung together by the thinnest of plots, with things happening for seemingly no logical rhyme or reason except to show the audience something cool and expensive. And believe me, it is all very cool and very expensive. But the absence of strong leads in either Eddie O'Connell or Patsy Kensit and a definite directorial philosophy of "style over substance" that manifests itself as movie "things happen just because". A 14-year old con artist that goes from bubblegum pop merchandise hawker, to pimp, to white supremacist? There's that. David Bowie as an advertising executive-nee-corrupt real estate developer using said white supremacists to force minority tenants out of a future gentrification zone, whose accent oscillates wildly between dialect and continent? This film's got you covered. Bruce Payne screaming the lyrics "Great Balls of Fire" while pounding on a flaming piano? Don't know why or how you'd want that, but this movie certainly delivers. ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS is a film of set-pieces and expensive showcases but little else, intended to envoke some deep sense of nostalgia for a period that most contemporary audience will be completely alien to. It's a film that just sort of exists because it does.