The Ploughman's Lunch

Always intelligent, but hardly cinematic, this is certainly an interesting film, but not fully entertaining. I saw it on release and again for the second time this week and the lasting impression is a dog's dinner of ideas. At the centre there is a doomed romance, overlaid with a smorgasbord of messages inter-weaved in the script. I shall attempt to list these message here. a) The long term decline of Britain's importance in the world, b) the folly of the Suez expedition and a sort of oblique parallel with the Falklands War which doesn't work - Suez was a disaster, the Falklands campaign successful, c) the emotional toughness/nastiness of the Thatcher government, d) the Greenham Common anti-nuclear encampment (not sure what this is doing in the film), e) the lies sold by advertising, f) the bias inherent in the way we rewrite history, g) the English class system, h) the emotional coldness of journalists. Phew! Added on to this, we have the conundrum of our hard to like hero James Penfield who wants love, but does not show it to those who love him. Crucially, he is foolishly chasing a snooty, upper (ruling) class girl whose own frivolous behaviour seems to be a comment on Britain's decline. The real shame is that there are some fantastic parts to the film. Rosemary Harris is just perfect as the love seeking historian. And, then there is the cinema magic of filming the denouement to the central romance within the real-life setting of the Conservative Party Conference. With a few changes this film could have been up there with Performance and Brief Encounter, instead of an obscure curio of British cinema.