| School For Seduction |
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| Saturday, 29 January 2005 | |
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2/10 UK 2004 : Sue HEEL : 105 mins After Purely Belter (2000) and The One and Only (2002), School for Seduction confirms a grim biennial trend for lousy "comedies" set in and around Newcastle-upon-Tyne. While undeniably photogenic - and growing more so every month thanks to fancy new riverside regeneration projects like the Millennium Bridge, Baltic and Sage Music Centre - the area has been notably ill-served by cinema in recent years. Indeed, you have to go back to Mike Figgis's uneven jazz-tinged thriller Stormy Monday (1987) for a Tyneside-set mainstream feature which isn't an embarrassing mess - can it be a coincidence that while Geordieland has provided the backdrop for some decent thrillers (including Payroll [1961], and most famously Get Carter [1972]), lighter fare has tended to turn out as flat as a Greggs' stottie? And it's perhaps telling that the most critically and commercially successful film ever made in the north-east - Billy Elliot (2000) - unfolded in County Durham and Teesside, and kept well away from Newcastle. In a classic hostage to fortune, Billy Elliot is actually namechecked during School for Seduction when a character remarks that he's rented the video of the film "because me mate's one of the extras." And this is surely the fate destined to befall Seduction - it's hard to imagine anyone selecting it at the video-store in the serious expectation they're in for a night of fun entertainment. Even the basic premise sounds lousy - this from the official press-release: The humdrum lives of four women are transformed by the arrival of Italian femme fatale Sophia Rosselini (Kelly Brook) and her School for Seduction. For Clare (Dervla Kirwan), Irene (Margi Clarke) and sisters' [sic] Kelly (Emily Woof) and Donna (Jessica Johnson), the School for Seduction is a much needed break from reality, promising success in how to be sexy, seductive and in control. All the women turn to Sophia for guidance and strength in their troubles, but unbeknown to them, Sophia has a dark secret that is about to be discovered... This "dark secret" should be apparent to any alert viewer from the very first scenes, in which we see Sophia fleeing her home in "Naples, Italy" (though end-credits reveal these exterior-location shots were filmed in Rome) and making her way to "Newcastle, England." The thudding predictability of the movie's "big twist" makes for a laborious couple of hours - not helped by the loud soundtrack muzak, patchy sound, bland cinematography, uninspired direction, cringe-making dialogue, unconvincing broad-brush characterisation and lame sense of humour. There's something here to offend everyone: the men we see are all oafs, including a violently macho Italian who's only slightly less OTT than Jonathan Cake's preening footy-star Sonny from The One and Only, and a nerdy car-obsessive who demands (in 2004!) that his highflying wife give up her successful career to wait on him hand and foot. In theory, the female characters should come off better - they're uniformly presented as superwomen, saints or force-of-nature fun-seekers with hearts of gold. But these roles are drawn with no more skill or imagination than the men, and the means by which one of the main characters obtains a promotion (ahead of her repulsive, devious boss) is quite stunningly demeaning. As the old saying goes, there really is something here to offend absolutely everybody. By the end you feel somewhat sorry for the cast, especially north-eastern newcomer Johnson who socks over her role with a ferocity that the film-makers clearly have little idea what to do with. Relative veterans Kirwan (looking understandably perturbed), Woof (accent not quite there) and Clarke (especially ill-served by her character's implausible antics) will survive to fight another day, but ex-model Brook - strenuously promoted as the star of the show - may struggle to overcome School for Seduction's meagre box-office returns and savage reviews. Many critics have isolated Brook's performance for special scorn, but this isn't at all fair - her accent-work in the latter stages rivals Richard Roxburgh's remarkable (if futile) turn in The One and Only, and while her acting does seem distinctly stilted and artificial for much of the film, in retrospect this woodenness actually makes sense in terms of the screenplay's (ludicrous) premise. 17th December, 2004 [seen 8th December : UGC Boldon : public show] |
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