|
Bill Forsyth's slightly-plotted tale of an ungainly teenager's romantic
yearning is arguably the warmest and most thoroughly charming British film to
emerge from the dark days of the early 1980s.
Though it deals, in its own wryly playful way, with the torture of
adolescence, and despite the opening scene, in which Gregory and his mates spy
on a nurse undressing, Gregory's Girl is strikingly innocent. No drugs or
violence stalk the school playground, and the boys' toilets are the province not
of bullies or smokers but of a thriving home-made confectionary business - and a
rival venture selling very demure photographs of football heroine Dorothy. And
when Gregory finally gets his moment of romantic fulfilment - not with the
unattainable Dorothy, but with the wily Susan (Clare Grogan, singer of summery
pop group Altered Images, and a poster girl for sensitive teenage
boys) - the horizontal dancing he proposes is entirely chaste.
In a film whose adults are remote or uninspiring (Gregory's father is reduced
to requesting an audience with his son at the breakfast table; artless football
coach Mr Menzies cultivates a moustache to look more 'grown-up'; the headmaster
indulges a secret cake passion), and the boys are childlike slaves to their
hormones, it's the girls who corner the market in wisdom, effortlessly
manipulating their unworthy suitors. Wisest of all is Gregory's 10-year-old
sister, Madeline, who generously dispenses top quality romantic advice to her clueless brother between sips of ginger beer and ice cream.
Despite such cute devices, Gregory's Girl deftly sidesteps preciousness and treacly sentimentality, thanks largely to the freshness
and conviction of its young cast, but also to its imagination, wit
and unpretentious experimentalism. Critic Gilbert Adair, writing in Sight &
Sound, hailed it as "a well nigh flawless comedy" and saw echoes in it of the energy and wit of the early French new wave. Certainly, one scene, in which an impromptu dressing room training session involving Dorothy and Mr Menzies develops into a spontaneous dance, calls to mind Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Part
(France, 1964), while other touches of low-key surrealism, notably the pupil in
full penguin costume forlornly wandering the school corridors, suggest a similar
debt. And as we follow Gregory on his roving, uncertain 'date', Forsyth almost
convinces us that the unglamorous, concrete new town of Cumbernauld is as romantic as
Paris.
Mark Duguid
|
