Neil Young's Film Lounge

School For Seduction

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]