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The Guardian
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Restless Natives: The Musical review – rambling remake sings different tune to cult 80s movie
One of the stories British cinema loves to tell is of working-class characters defeating the privations of Thatcherism using wit and creativity. In Brassed Off (1996), escape came in the form of communal music; in The Full Monty (1997), it was male striptease; and in Billy Elliot (2000), the romance of ballet. Setting the template for all these was Restless Natives (1985), a cult Scottish favourite in which two Edinburgh dreamers turn highway robbers and, in the gentlest possible way, take to holding up coachloads of American tourists while disguised as a wolfman and clown. Written by Ninian Dunnett, the whimsical comedy reflected on how a small nation could assert itself at a time of high unemployment, diminishing global significance and a tourist industry hungry for cliche. The land of William Wallace, Rob Roy and Robert the Bruce was no longer a country for heroes. With self-deprecating humour, the film imagines that role being taken on by two bumbling lads from a joke shop. The majestic music of Big Country, with Stuart Adamson's yearning vocals and bagpipe-like guitar lines, was an ironic counterpoint to their amateurish scheme. The Big Country connection seems to have inspired Dunnett, working with the film's director Michael Hoffman, to bring Restless Natives to the stage as a musical. The band's songs, such as Come Up Screaming, I Walk the Hill and Ships, now sit alongside new musical-theatre numbers by Tim Sutton, most rather different in style. They range from It's Good to Be Bad, a bar-room knees up that could have been in Oliver!, to I Am the Wolf, a dark music-box lullaby that might have worked in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. They are sung brightly by a lively cast led by Kyle Gardiner as Ronnie, Finlay McKillop as Will and Kirsty MacLaren as Margot, Will's Beauty and the Beast love interest. But Restless Natives is not a story of high passions and grand dramatic moments. Little calls out for song. The pleasure is in its undulations and quiet observation. However briskly arranged, the songs – and there are many – only slow down the narrative. Extending the film's 90 minutes by nearly an hour, the production drains the comic momentum and labours a delicate idea. At Perth theatre until 10 May. Then touring until 28 June
The Guardian
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The full comté: quest to make a semi-hard cheese is French cinema's breakout hit of the year
Louise Courvoisier grew up the daughter of farmers in France's eastern Jura region and, by the time she was 15, was desperate to leave this backwater. So she chose a boarding school 100km away in Besançon that happened to offer a cinema course. 'I really needed to get out, for sure,' says the director, now 31. 'But after my studies I needed to come back, and I had a new point of view. Leaving let me look at things differently and see what others don't see. And I think that, without getting that distance on the region, I couldn't have made this film.' The film in question is Holy Cow, a rough-edged, sharp-tongued but good-hearted tale about one teenager's quest to make a prize-winning wheel of comté cheese, a Jura speciality. The story appears to be comparable to the likes of The Full Monty or Brassed Off – British underdog comedies that Courvoisier admires for their social conscience. But actually it is rawer and more immediate. It is anchored in the predicament of its protagonist, Totone, who is left to provide for his younger sister after their alcoholic father kills himself driving – and the pent-up isolation and frustration of the French countryside presses in. Next to Marcel Pagnol nostalgia, the film is a heady huff of diesel oil; its French title, Vingt Dieux, is a local exclamation literally meaning '20 gods!' It was always Courvoisier's goal to cow-tip the stereotypes visible among what she dismisses as the 'annual quota of French rural films'. But bringing a crew into the region to film there was risky. 'It was very delicate because people from the Jura are kind of wild, because it's such a remote region,' she says in a Zoom call, her backdrop the stone wall of the farmhouse she shares with her parents and siblings. 'They're never in contact with people from elsewhere, so there's this distrust of anything from outside.' Added to that was Holy Cow's unfiltered approach: it loiters in the sozzled village fetes and demolition derbies that punctuate rural boredom, and focuses on the ne'er-do-wells and marginalised. 'I think most people in the region would have preferred if my main character was someone ambitious who takes over a farm and gives a flamboyant image of the countryside,' says Courvoisier. 'But instead I decided to talk about those people everyone wants to hide.' In doing so, she joins a recent cadre of French films with a more abrasive and complex take on the countryside, such as those of Alain Guiraudie, and 2023's Super-Bourrés (Super Drunk) and Chiens de la Casse (Junkyard Dog). Courvoisier got the Jurassiens onside by involving them as much as possible in the production, most significantly by casting local non-professionals. Lead actor Clément Faveau, whose performance is fantastically irate and determined, is a poultry farm worker in real life. After he initially refused the role, she worked on him until he accepted. 'That mixture of violence and fragility that was written on his face, in his eyes, was exactly what I was looking for,' she says. 'I think his personality isn't always easy for him or those around him to handle because he's really highly strung.' Courvoisier's attachment to the area isn't just academic. Like the rest of her family, she divides her time between artistic activities and working on the farm, which produces cereals only using animal labour. With a thick mop of wavy black hair, and wearing a Princeton T-shirt, she has the fresh-faced complexion of someone who doesn't solely spend their time in editing suites. In mid-March when we talk, the serious labour hasn't yet begun – but she's trying to get rid of nesting bees in the walls. 'You're detaching yourself completely from reality when you make cinema,' she says. 'So it helps me to have another activity that's satisfying and concrete.' Furthering the artisanal feel, Courvoisier's family – her 'pack', as she calls them – were also closely involved with the film. Her parents, who were touring baroque musicians before they were farmers, and one of her brothers composed the score; her other brother and sister did the set design. Despite the artistic background, Courvoisier didn't have a cinephile upbringing. With the nearest cinema 20km away, the family usually spent DVD evenings in front of commercial Hollywood fodder such as Pirates of the Caribbean and Jaws. Strangely for a small independent film, blockbusters were what Courvoisier and her cinematographer on Holy Cow often watched for inspiration. Fast and Furious films were a point of reference for the demolition derby scenes. And as a way of getting round the difficulty of filming beds interestingly, she used what she calls the 'Magic Mike shot': a painterly juxtaposition of two lovers' faces. 'My influences aren't just cinephile or intellectual, but also mainstream,' Courvoisier says. 'It's interesting to work out how certain films attract such large audiences. Even if we're making something very different, I like to try and have that generosity.' By Jura standards, Holy Cow hit the big time: far surpassing box office expectations, it also earned two César awards, including best debut for Courvoisier. She thinks the film has created an excitement and a sense of pride in seeing the region's reality up on screen. And she hopes that, by pulling in both urban and rural audiences, it may get the metropolitan networks who control cinema more interested in provincial film-makers and their outlook. In any case, she is staying put. 'For now, I have no desire to go elsewhere. I need a mixture of fantasy and real life that I wouldn't necessarily find outside of the Jura's borders. It's my arena of cinema.' Holy Cow is in US cinemas now and released in UK cinemas on 11 April
The Guardian
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Toxic Town review – Jodie Whittaker is obviously award-worthy in this bittersweet tale
Corby, Northamptonshire, 1995: the disused steelworks that were once the heartbeat of the town are to be redeveloped into housing and a theme park. As the land is cleared, a crimson dust that will later be shown to contain cadmium and other highly toxic substances is stirred up; open-topped trucks full of the stuff career past unknowing residents to a messy landfill. And so the scene is set for Toxic Town, a true-story drama about a very British scandal. Susan McIntyre's partner works at the site, while Tracey Taylor is an accountant there who has to sluice thick red sludge off her car every evening when she goes home. Susan (Jodie Whittaker) and Tracey (Aimee Lou Wood) meet on a maternity ward, before both give birth to children with disabilities. When Susan realises other women nearby have had similar outcomes, she starts a campaign for justice. Meanwhile, concerns raised within the council about poisonous soil are silenced with bribes and bullying by senior figures who won't allow anything to jeopardise the construction project, which had a dodgy tendering process. It's not until 2009 that Susan and co are able to demonstrate council negligence and achieve a landmark court victory. In the darker moments here, there are flashes of the bleak malevolence of Red Riding or Sherwood. Cause trouble for the greasy-lipped men in double-breasted suits and they will send thugs in donkey jackets to smash up your car; threaten them with legal consequences for corruption and the building with all the evidence in it will mysteriously catch fire. But, however distressing the facts of the case, Toxic Town feels a responsibility to ensure its audience sticks it out. So, ultimately, this is a bittersweet feelgood piece, more along the lines of Britflicks such as Pride, Brassed Off and The Full Monty, where ordinary people suffer in deindustrialised towns that have intractable problems, but score a win by supporting each other. The shape of the drama is familiar; cosy, even. At times, it spoon-feeds us. At the end of a scene, where soon-to-be-pregnant Maggie (Claudia Jessie) hangs her husband's discarded work jeans on the rotary airer in the back garden and beats the dust out of them with a badminton racket, perhaps we don't need a slow-motion shot of malignant particles mushrooming into the air. When the dispute reaches court, the barrister representing the council doesn't have to be so eyeball-swivellingly malicious. The property developer who makes his fortune while his home town suffers could be less of a grinning cartoon villain. Similarly, the wider importance of the story is not allowed to get lost in subtext. Toxic Town is about fighting back against politics that prioritises 'profits over people' and if you didn't twig that on your own, the script has one of the good guys use that exact phrase. It's concerned with how 'red tape' is a term used only by shysters, because it always means measures that hinder moneymen from shafting working people – again, this is spelled out in the dialogue. The show is moral about not letting greed trample community. Despite this being illustrated by a struggle that concluded a decade and a half ago, Toxic Town feels fresh. It arrives only a year after Mr Bates vs the Post Office turned an against-the-odds fight for justice into the biggest drama on TV (the campaign's first public meeting, where the mothers realise their strength in numbers, has heavy Bates vibes) and lands in a political moment where leaders of various stripes are pretending that slashing regulations is an urgent public concern. All that being the case, the occasional cheesiness of Toxic Town doesn't matter, especially when the writer, Jack Thorne, is so careful to mine this dire situation for nuggets of precious humanity. The emotional journey undergone by parents of disabled children, as they fight the instinct to believe that they are at fault and try to improve their children's lives without treating them as a problem, is sensitively sketched. The difficulty for wronged individuals in taking a stand, when powerful enemies have ensured that doing so will come at great cost, is explored and acknowledged. The friendship between the two central characters – the sharp, belligerent and often scathingly funny Susan orbiting around Tracey's quiet wisdom – is perfectly performed by an obviously award-worthy Whittaker and a less demonstrative but equally brilliant Wood, who can convey all Tracey's determination and smothered pain with a curve of a sad smile. For the people involved – while some characters are fictional, Whittaker, Wood and Jessie play real women – this was a life-defining fight that deserves to be celebrated. If Toxic Town turns it into an easy dramatic win, it is forgiven. Toxic Town is on Netflix now
