Film - Jonathan Romney on a sequel that isn't
For several years Bill Forsyth has been the lost man of British cinema. Long before Trainspotting he put low-budget Scottish realism on the commercial map with his second feature Gregory's Girl (1980), which showed an idiosyncratic humorist and humanist decanting Ealing's comic verve into the Ken Loach tradition. For a few years, Forsyth buoyantly went his own way, crowd-pleasingly in the unashamedly romantic Local Hero and with intense melancholia in Comfort and Joy.
When Forsyth went to the States, however, he seemed to leave his public behind. No one much noticed the excellent Breaking In, a small-time crime story from a John Sayles script. And it was Hollywood that finally did for him. An unhappy experience wrestling with Warner Bros over the 1994 portmanteau piece Being Human (with humanity in its many guises played by Robin Williams, who else?) left Forsyth feeling all too human and ready to pack in the game for good.
Recently Forsyth announced he was ready to return to the fray. The ominous news was that he was preparing a sequel to his first hit. A return to roots can be revivifying, but more often than not it signifies desperation. In fact, the awkwardly titled Gregory's Two Girls does anything but milk the old formula. It's hugely idiosyncratic as sequels go, in that Forsyth openly acknowledges the impossibility of recapturing the old joie de vivre. He seems determined to show that you can never go home again.
Gawky teenager Gregory (John Gordon-Sinclair) is now a no less gawky English teacher, still with his penchant for athletic lasses. The difference is that this time the lass in question is 20 years younger and one of his pupils. The film starts with a torrid locker-room clinch between Greg and Frances (Carly McKinnon). It's only his wet dream - but it starts the film off on an uncomfortable note: a schoolteacher lusting after his pupils isn't considered a terribly amusing topic these days. It's all right, we're assured during some saucy banter between Greg and his old school chum Fraser (Dougray Scott), Frances is 16, not 15. But it leaves a nasty taste; Forsyth isn't tackling a taboo, just making a bar-room joke that's past its cultural expiry date. The awkwardness turns to downright creepiness when Greg is called before the head to swear that nothing untoward is going on, and the film writhes in extended agonies over his unfunny Freudian slip about badgers and beavers.
All in all, there's something a bit dysfunctional about Greg, a solitary dreamer who sits at home watching Noam Chomsky videos and rejects the mature attentions of his colleague Bel (Maria Doyle Kennedy) - not just rejects them, but grovels in terror in his kitchen while she rages drunkenly outside. I think we're meant to see this as lovable man-boy vulnerability. But Greg seems more like a case of arrested emotional development, made all the worse by Gordon-Sinclair's playing to camera; there are so many quirks, twitches and moues in his cheeky-chap repertoire that he's very nearly a male Calista Flockhart.
Forsyth allows his hero a peculiar redemption. Frances wants Greg all right, but for strictly political purposes. Boy-made-good Fraser, now the region's own Bill Gates, is apparently manufacturing some manner of sonic death device. Greg's political awakening follows, thanks to Frances's staunch idealism, a hazily defined activist (Martin Schwab) and a night of folk-songs with the local Chilean exiles.
It's hard to buy all this. Greg's redemption is too obviously a feat of sublimation. He saves himself by swapping lust for politics - the real two "girls" of the title. But we don't quite believe Greg's dead-of-night espionage, or that his personable smoothie buddy is the sinister compromised exploiter we're told he's become. Forsyth is harking back to a political cinema that made perfect sense in the 1980s but feels a bit black and white now - the us-and-them language of the paranoid political thriller, which isn't easily grafted on to a mawkish sex comedy.
There's suddenly an uneasy shift to a style that recalls 1980s British conspiracy thrillers such as Defence of the Realm or the BBC's Edge of Darkness. In the most incongruous scene, Greg and Frances visit the Scottish Office, only to have generic faceless bureaucrats throw the Official Secrets Act at them and warn him he's "not a citizen - but a subject of the Queen". Gregory beams back, "Scotland will be a nation again". Well, fair enough, but - ouch. Just as awkwardly, Forsyth goes out of his way to make his anti- American sentiments seem even-handed. Greg cringes at the way that US culture has run rampant in his school, but beams with approval at finding his sister's boyfriend (Kevin Anderson) "a thinking, feeling Yank", like Chomsky himself.
Greg's final gesture of direct action comes across as curiously isolated, self-destructively quixotic - all the more hollow in that it allows him to score moral points with his admiring teenage fancy. It also feels bizarre that a character of only 35 is placed in the position of a fond old codger. Gregory seems to become simply a hanger for some confused feelings, both idealistic and bitter, that Forsyth has about the world. It's disappointing that a film-maker once so light on his feet and so wryly vigorous in his world view should have returned as a sort of cinematic Kingsley Amis. He's still his own man, though - I can't think of many other directors who would give product placement to New Internationalist.
"Gregory's Two Girls" (15) is released in the London West End and Scotland
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