The Eighties are affectionately evoked in this tale of childhood loyalty
Son of Rambow (12A)
dir: Garth Jennings
I should declare an interest in Son of Rambow, a British comedy about two 11-year-old boys in the early Eighties who shoot a sequel to First Blood (the original Sylvester Stallone Rambo film) in the woods near their home, using whatever objects come to hand - kites, plastic dogs, Eric Sykes. No, I never directed any backyard action spectaculars; my own adolescent camcorder efforts were either shamelessly schlocky (monster in a phone box, anyone?) or full of pretentious camera angles. You should have seen the shot I set up inside a cereal box, with Rice Krispies cascading away from the lens and into the bowl: it was worth a South Bank Show all to itself.
In fact, I was at school with Garth Jennings, the writer-director of Son of Rambow - we both attended the same unremarkable comprehensive after which he has very sweetly named the one in the film. It's a neat touch that the school, and everything else in here, looks gleefully larger than life. While the script's whimsical humour recalls Gregory's Girl, the visual style is very bold, very Rushmore.
The toilet cubicle inside which 11-year-old Will (Bill Milner) has felt-tipped an entire Bayeux Tapestry of cartoons has Tardis-like proportions. A gang of geeks, led by a punky French exchange student, streak their hair and cruise around on Choppers shooting pigeons out of the sky.
The world is presented exactly as it would appear to sheltered, naive Will, who has been raised by his widowed mother (Jessica Hynes) in a family of Plymouth Brethren. He sees the sixth-form common room as a vast orchard of forbidden fruit, with its girls, limitless confectionery and Depeche Mode dance routines. (The reality, at our school, ran to little more than some George and Mildred furniture and a Thompson Twins poster.)
Will falls under the spell of Lee Carter (Will Poulter), a tough-nut classmate living in the plush quarters behind a run-down care home. After sneaking a peek at a pirate copy of First Blood, Will eagerly joins his new chum in making an amateur video worthy of the top prize on the BBC children's series Screen Test. Will is bitten hard by the film-making bug, and is soon presiding over an ambitious set with coloured gels, flares and teenage ADs running around with clipboards. But Lee decides it was better when it was just the two of them - a touching refrain that will ring true to any film-maker for whom success has removed what was great about cinema in the first place.
Just as historians will nod approvingly if the bodices in a period drama have been sewn together with the correct stitching, so anyone who grew up in the Seventies and Eighties will be oohing and aahing like it's Bonfire Night during Son of Rambow, marvelling at how the film-makers have got every detail just so: the shop that stocks three kinds of cereal (three!) and proudly declares itself to be open five days a week (five!); the use of "skill" as an approving adjective, and the phrase "My itchy blue beard!" as an indicator of scepticism; the sight of cinema audiences, pointlessly segregated into "Smoking" and "No Smoking" sections, squinting at the screen through a blue fog.
All this is affectionate window-dressing for a simple, wistful tale of childhood loyalty. Son of Rambow sticks with its emphatic wee heroes all the way, treating their adventures and aspirations credulously, without a protective coating of irony or the benefit of hindsight. Despite its imaginative flourishes, the film would fall apart without its bright-as-buttons newcomers, Milner and Poulter, who capture the hurt and yearning that bristle below the surface of the most rambunctious friendships.
Jennings and his producing partner Nick Goldsmith (known collectively as Hammer and Tongs) made the warmly quirky 2005 film of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but they intended Son of Rambow to be their debut. You can see why. It has the breeziness and honesty of a knock-out first feature. It is also very funny, although the biggest joke of all - that the picture was on the back-burner for years because no one in the UK had the foresight to finance it - is the one least likely to raise a smile.
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dir: Daniele Luchetti
Sibling rivalry in Sixties and Seventies Italy.
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