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24 Hour Party People
***1/2
Cinema Releases - April 5, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. 120
minutes. Directed by Michael Winterbottom. Written by Frank Cottrell Boyce.
Starring Steve Coogan, Shirley Henderson, Paddy Considine, Andy Serkis, Lennie
James, Danny Cunningham, Sean Harris, Kate Magowan, John Simm, Ron Cook,
John Thomson.
On the evidence of "24 Hour Party
People", Tony Wilson was such an awful businessman that it's hard
to believe he got anything released, let alone turned Factory Records into
one of the legendary forces of the British music scene. "We lose five pence
on every copy we sell," someone advises him of New Order's "Blue Monday".
"Ah, who cares," replies Wilson, while he peruses some unrelated paperwork.
"We'll hardly sell any anyway." And then it becomes the best-selling single
of all time.
Wilson, as we know, was a reporter for ITV and
the presenter of "So It Goes", the show that allowed him to tap into the
post-punk music scene and inspired him to start Factory Records and the Hacienda
nightclub, which gave us bands like Joy Division, Buzzcocks, New Order and
Happy Mondays. Enormously popular, sure, but nobody made any money. There's
a point in this movie where Wilson's assistants are shifting cash between
different offices to create the illusion of staying afloat, and Wilson's
response to the situation is to spend £3,000 on an avant-garde desk
and allow Shaun Ryder to go record an album in Barbados. A producer gets
fifty quid an hour to trash drum kits and spill whisky on his mixing desk.
It all feels like some kind of grotty, hopelessly small-time juggling trick,
which is exactly what it was.
Michael Winterbottom's film, which begins in 1976
and hurtles its way through to the mid-1990s, is not a traditional tale of
rise and fall. Like a movement itself, the movie throws out traditions while
dancing around with them, winking at them and giving them the finger. "24
Hour Party People" feeds off the energy of the Manchester scene, celebrating
its music and imagery while poking bits of fun at it lest we take things
too seriously. An early scene at a Sex Pistols gig sees Wilson turn to the
camera and inform us, "Every one of these people will be inspired to go out
and create like no one in history before!". . . at which point Winterbottom
cuts to a wide shot showing a paltry crowd of drab, smoke-dried faces. The
Wilson character narrates the picture with constant comparisons to the French
Renaissance, and at one point even suggests that the Hacienda was the first
place to combine music and dancing.
Um, no. The Manchester scene was hardly negligible,
but it wasn't that important. And Factory Records was not the whole story
-- it doesn't, for example, include The Smiths, The Stone Roses or Oasis.
"24 Hour Party People" seems to know this, hence the ironic flavour. This
is an extraordinarily self-conscious film, with Wilson telling us about missing
scenes, pointing out the celebrity cameos and giving us such lessons as "This
scene is symbolic -- it works on two levels!" The real Howard DeVoto appears
onscreen beside the actor playing him to say, "I really don't remember this
happening, you know." And Wilson has an answer to that, too: "If it's a choice
between fact and legend, go for the legend."
"This is not a film about me!" says Wilson more
than once, but that's exactly what it is -- a comedy about an inspired doofus.
Steve Coogan nails the voice and mannerisms of the real Wilson while giving
off the broadly comic vibes of Peter Sellers and creating a performance that
represents Winterbottom's vision of the Factory Records tale. Coogan communicates
Wilson's clumsy stabs at profundity as he signs a contract in blood that
declares there will be no contracts, he hilariously mixes genuinely passionate
lines with overreaching pseudo-intellectual babble, and he encapsulates a
group of people who had good ideas and a lack of common sense, who found
themselves stabbing in the dark, ending up with bits of great art and a helluva
lot of problems.
Winterbottom's unruly visuals are like a time
capsule, mimicking the look of old television footage by filming on cheap
videotape and seamlessly matching new footage with archive pictures. On top
of these grubby shots are title cards that jump about the screen radiating
acid house colours. It's as chaotic and confounding as the real midst of
a movement -- this is a movie of hyperkinetic mess, pulling us in and along
with giddy energy, and in its own way, it's brilliant.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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