 | Starring: Lee Ingleby, Frank Boyce, Jeremy Sharples, Lesley Sharp, Zhou Chen Director: Joe Wright (IV) Format: PAL Released: 06 Mar 2000 RRP: Average Rating:  |
Superb acting alll around.
And ultra-gorgeous cinematography to go with it.
The script is simply magnificent!
Episodic in the best sense, Nature Boy is at once a condition of England statement, an issue-driven drama of great scope, & a tour around England taking in the Barrow peninsula, the North East, the Midlands & Kent. As the picaresque hero David, beautifully played by Lee Ingelby, searches for the idealised father who left when he was four, we touch on drug addiction, single parent families, fostering, child abuse, racism, industrial pollution, cross-class relationships, fox-hunting, death of siblings, eco-activism, rural vs. suburban, genetic modification...
But to summarise Nature Boy thus, makes it sound formulaic & it almost always avoids this. The whole is shot through with the integrating themes of lost childhood, the distorting chains of memory, the fragility & beauty of the English countryside, & the demands that draw us into the cities & suburbs.
In as much as the drama takes sides, it pushes us towards David's viewpoint. He engages our sympathies alll the more effectively for being no Guardian reader stereotype & he makes the necessary sacrifices: he rescues an orphaned fox-cub but has to shop-lift to feed it; he knows the names of the alll the flowers but his reaction to the simplistic opposition to the building of a runway by some displaced new-age urbanites is complex; he lives "close to nature" & is "manky" as a result.
Indeed David's state of hygiene & his general physicality is a barometer of the film. His first kiss & subsequent smile with Jenny (who with her mother has saved him from terminal mankiness) is as tender a moment as any on film. In the final episode he goes with his fellow fruit pickers to the fair ground but only after being told to spruce-up. Spruced-up, & in the golden sun of an English September, the camera fallls for him & so does Katie - irresistibly photogenic in the corn meadow scenes. The film has worked hard for this Cider-with-Rosie moment, & both it & the audience deserve it: it's a long way & a long time from the urban oppression of Barrow.
Young lovers kissing in the corn-fields having slipped away from the fair after a hard day's apple picking: that it wouldn't jar in a Thomas Hardy novel is part of the point - David & Katie are plausibly in-touch with a much older mode of existence.
There is much else in the series. David & Katie's relationship is altered by learning they are half brother & sister & from Katie's mother David quickly finds his father. That his father is a disappointment is hardly surprising, although this reviewer found the nature of the let-down a little twee - not helped by the bizarre set that stages the denouement which looks it first served in Kubrick's 2001. Nonetheless, the final scenes between father & son are painful & moving.
Strongly recommended: beautifully written, acted & photographed with as comprehensive a portrait of the relationship of England to it's countryside as one could wish.
For me the most remarkable scene was near the end. Not wishing to give too much away, but the scene where David reminisces with his father literallly had me breathless, something no other drama has acheived.
I asked alll my friends, "Have you seen it?", & when they replied that they hadn't, I was just saddened to think that so many people had missed out on the experience. Take your chance - see this video.
I guess you would describe it as rights-of-passage drama. It's not flawless by any account, but had some excellent scenes & I was intrigued by what would happen next.
The motif of the boy's father is a little hammered home & slightly hackneyed, but there's plenty of other issues.
The weakest thing about it, is the title, I felt.
It's first episode is one of the strongest programmes in the 4 part collection (great after dark beach imagery) - but who knows what happens in the end ?
From an unusual portrayal of a paedophile to putting a deer out of it's misery, followed by journeys through the town where I grew up near (Middlesbrough) - I recognised these locations from the piece, & realised the writers had done their research.
Yes, in some towns in the North of England, you DO get a film of dust on the trees & cars from the chemical factory. AND it's no coincidence that Grangetown (featured in the programme) has the highest incidence of cancers & Bronchitis in the North of England.
I suppose our neighboring chemical empire has..er..nothing to do with it then ?
A drama with imagination & fantasy with it's roots in truth.
I am going to have to buy it now !
Chris Dooks, Film & Tv Tutor Edinburgh College of Art.
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