It Couldn't Happen Here

On the back of releasing their album 'Actually', which plays like a greatest hits and includes the iconic "It's a Sin", PSBs decided to release this musical, feature length music video, depending how you'd like to look at it. As a film, it is disjointed, pretentious, with some fairly dreadful dialogue, delivered mostly in Neil Tennant's dull monotone. As a music video, it's perfect, full of odd and surreal goings on, with a few hand fulls of sexual innuendo, interspersed with catholic imagery, nuns in suspenders, a killer priest, Barbara Winsor, an appallingly over the top used car salesman and Clacton acting as the backdrop, the not so proverbial coastal town that they forgot to close down. We all know the landscape, and the songs, fast forward the bad bits by all means, but It Couldn't Happen Here, It's a Sin, Heart, Suberbia and One More Chance will each leave you encapsulated and wondering why more bands don't give this a try. Flawed yes, but Neil and Chris, thank you for give us this.

A real gem of an indie film. British, with great production value, lots of strange dollying shots and some fisheye shots too. The look of it is like a sparce and cheaply-made Terry Gilliam film, with a minimal and very absurdist plot filled with odd references to the Pet Shop Boys songbook, their childhoods, and their love for surrealist art, kitsch gay, biker, slapstick, and Derek Jarman films, as well as touches of Steven Wright jokery and some nice colors. I've got this on tape, and yes, you can't find it anywhere! The Pet Shop Boys are brilliant! Now, if they did it again, they should come up with a real script, and have someone like Baz Luhrmann or better yet David Cronenberg make it. Horrific, asexual, glamorous, poppy, tripped-out, and often quite, quite funny. Neato!

Wonderfully eccentric mix of influences - catholicism, run-down seaside towns, naughty nuns, greasy spoon caffs - this has got the lot.

Obviously, not as much fun for people that don't like the Pet Shop Boys - but even they might find some amusements here.

This is one of my most favourite films of all time. I know a couple of people who went to see it at the cinema, and they just didn't get it. I got it on video whilst at college. The film has an essential philosophical message clouded in a blend of surrealism and eighties electronic music. The message is simple - what is time ? Check out the ventriloquists dummy for the answer. A keen observation from most people who call the film a flop is that it does not follow a plot - which is annoying to some people (but look at pulp fiction - what plot?) - its a journey through time and their songs. So surreal I love it. I suspect it makes little sense because they have fit the script around each of the song's stories and stitched each one together. Do films really have to make sense ? Too many films today are based on reality and I thought movie watching was about losing yourself in escapism. This world is real & serious enough. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Give it a chance & Let yourself go.

What an intriguing little film It Couldn't Happen Here is. Not necessarily a good one, but an intriguing film nonetheless.

In turns dark and pretentious, it was filmed at a time when the Pet Shop Boys were still melancholy, "ironic" performers, and so Tennant's slightly anaemic vocals are made bearable by not being underscored by a full disco production. The title song is one of their best, an esoteric album track that favours orchestra over synthesiser. The songs form backdrops to the majority of the film, while the two pop stars are just about passable as actors. The characters they play seem to have some form of communication, but it is entirely non-verbal, they never exchanging words with each other once throughout the movie. In fact, Chris Lowe (keyboards) doesn't speak at all until almost half an hour in, only having 28 words in total.

Tennant, meanwhile, is quite the opposite, carrying the bulk of the plot in his continual monotone monologues. Some of these are naive, would-be meaningful commentaries, such as the siloquoy that "Ever since I was a child the comic and the hostile seemed to go hand in hand". At other times he quotes from his own songs, an unfortunate act that highlights their limitations. Apparently wearing a wig, his interactions with the other actors (including an irksome Gareth Hunt in multiple roles) are less successful, but still adequate for a `music' film.

Symbolism is evident, linked alongside film referencing. Nods are given to Brief Encounter and North by Northwest, while the use of surrealism (men with zebra faces, burning businessmen, billboard posters of blank walls) go to show the production team had been watching their Peter Greenaway movies. Where the film really succeeds is in its distorted psychological makeup. Arguably, the film doesn't happen on any conventional sense of reality, but entirely in a mindscape. The duo walk nonchalantly through a deserted English seaside town, where motorcycle gangs trade places with SS nuns and sexual intent is prevalent. This is a film that will be infinitely more successful with English audiences, where it's depiction of repressed sexuality and cultural disfunctionality is more telling. Lacing the whole plot thread together (not that there really is a plot, of course) is a look at the more terrifying face of Catholicism.

The film concludes with a performance, as all band films do, though this time it's audience is a group of ballroom dancers, with the ubiquitous existentialist dummy getting the final word. If all this sounds a little bizarre, then it is. Not exactly original, It Couldn't Happen Here still triumphs as being quite unlike any film you've ever seen.