I love how awful My Oxford Year is

Spectator

2 days ago

The punters are saying My Oxford Year is a disaster. 'Predictable, uninspiring and laughable,' complains some meanie on Rotten Tomatoes. But they're missing the point. My Oxford Year may be a work of accidental genius, but it's a work of genius nonetheless. You will squirm, you will laugh derisively, you will cringe. By the end, though, you will be forced to admit that you secretly enjoyed every moment, for this is the very examplar of a so-bad-it's-good masterpiece.
You know it's going to be awful from the very first frame: a still representing the bookshelf of our handsome, clever and poor heroine Anna De La Vega (Sofia Carson) who has come up to Oxford to spend a year doing an MA in Victorian poetry prior to taking up a job at Goldman Sachs. It includes three copies of Dover Beach & Other Poems; two Great Gatsbys; two Mansfield Parks. Yup, they couldn't be bothered to get even that detail right.
Luckily, it seems that despite being a driven, brilliant high-achiever, Anna isn't really here to study. No, what she wants is romance. And who better to provide it than the handsome guy with that oh-so-cute way of biting his lower lip whom she first encounters when he splashes her with his sky-blue E-type, then meets again shortly afterwards in the chippy, whose Dick Van Dyke-style proprietor affords much opportunity for hilarious linguistic confusion. By amazing coincidence, lip-biter Jamie Davenport (Corey Mylchreest) happens to be teaching her poetry course because, besides being incredibly rich and the son of a lord with a vast estate, he is also a postgrad with the finest mind of his generation.
Not that we see much evidence of this in his seminars, which eschew close textual analysis in favour of insights such as 'Poetry can be taught. But really it should be tried' and 'Allow it to change your life!' These moony-eyed aperçus are directed shamelessly and solely at Anna, but instead of being appalled and asking for their money back, all the 15 or so NPCs at the MA seminar seem to find the flirtation charming and not at all an abuse of privilege or a waste of their course fee.
Later, in the pub, Anna encounters the racism with which this mystifyingly unwoke version of Oxford is rife. Someone whose advances she rebuffs clocks her as 'Mexican' (but how? She looks and speaks like an upper-class American) and accuses her of having only got on the course as part of a diversity quota. To cheer her up, Jamie takes her to a kebab van, a gastronomic experience she finds so idyllic that when she later meets an oarsman who doesn't share her enthusiasm for grey-brown mechanically recovered rodent meat wrapped in cardboard and slimed with chilli, she identifies him instantly as a ignorant snob who doesn't even know the kebab man's first name.
See what fun it is? It's like a Richard Curtis movie, but shorn of all the smugness, the emetic Blairite politics and any pretensions to be anything other than a compendium of clichés. Everything is here: the Boat Race that everyone from Oxford and Cambridge attends; the glamorous white tie Commem Ball; the montage illustrative of the developing relationship; the cheeky, outrageous gay friend; the will-they-won't-they couple who get it together right at the end just in time to cheer us up when we're feeling a bit sad that one of our protagonists is dying.
Sorry for that spoiler, but come on, you can hardly not have expected it. With a generic, bitter-sweet romcom like this, of course they're going to have to wheel out the cancer plot-device to undercut all that weapons-grade saccharine with a properly teary ending. And I respect them for it. This film is tripe and it knows it's tripe. It's so bad, it makes Bridgerton look like Tarkovsky. If only more screen products were quite this endearingly frank.
For more off-kilter summer merriment, I'd quite recommend another Netflix series Mandala Murders. It's about a pair of detectives – Rea Thomas (Vaani Kapoor) and Vikram Singh (Vaibhav Raj Gupta) – in the fictional town of Charandaspur in Uttar Pradesh, on the trail of whoever has been committing a series of grisly ritual murders possibly involving supernatural forces.
I'm not suggesting that it's significantly better quality than My Oxford Year, but because it is made and set in India you really don't care. Whenever you tire of the confusing plot and endless flashbacks, you can distract yourself with thoughts like 'Oo, that bright painted room would make a nice boutique hotel interior' and 'Omg, he actually dived into the Ganges. I hope he got danger money for that scene' and 'That roadside chapati snack looks delicious.' Or is it just me who does that?