Friends & Crocodiles

I enjoyed Friends and Crocodiles and strongly suggest viewing it more than once. More nuances are then perceptible which fleshes out the story line that otherwise is convoluted and can be confusing. Both Paul and Lizzie demonstrate an extreme level of self control, although each of a different nature and each exhibited in vastly different ways. Lewis and May are exceptionally well suited for those two roles and do an excellent job of keeping the viewer focused on their personalities and the theme, rather than have attention wander off on other characters or subplots. The interplay between the two of them can easily be viewed as signifying human interaction in areas other than the business world.

Friends and Crocodiles follows the career of Paul, a brilliant entrepreneur who has made his fortune from retail. As well as being talented, he is also feckless and unstable. We open in 1981, when Paul is the owner of a beautiful country house set in a vast estate (echoes of Richard Branson's purchase of The Manor near Oxford a few years earlier). We then follow Paul's volatile career, which becomes intertwined with that of Lizzie, a talented manager, whom he recruits as his PA from a local estate agent. She brings order to the chaos of the house, which Paul has filled with an assortment of freaks who are all expecting to make it big in something. Lizzie storms out of his employment after a stunt at one of Paul's parties puts people in danger and as the years progress their paths cross at intervals, their relationship slowly mutating into one of grudging mutual respect. Despite the chaos he creates around him, it is his judgement that she ends up respecting, against the entrenched wisdom of the whole business establishment.

The film is a sharp, accurate and very involving tour of Britain over the last quarter century, through the high noon of Thatcherism, the wobbling confidence of the Major years, the dot com boom and the subsequent meltdown, through to the present. The lunacies, the technologies, the pain and the silliness. Maybe you had to live through it and suffer with it for Friends and Crocodiles to work. But even without that it's a vision very difficult to ignore.

Nowhere on television have I seen colour used as it is here. Almost every shot is a work of art, which of course makes it sound pretentious. It isn't pretentious on screen -- just a succession of startling, highly unusual and often very beautiful images. In some ways reminiscent of Fellini's movies, but more rooted in the everyday.

Underpinning it are the expert performances of Damian Lewis as Paul and Jodhi May as Lizzie, which are crisp, sharp and utterly believable.

One of Stephen Poliakoff's most interesting films, I was very glad to catch up with it recently (via Netflix DVD).

He manages to not only present a most unusual variation on screen love stories, this one about a deep but platonic relationship among co-workers but also encapsulates the key societal changes in recent decades in novel fashion.

Most impressive to me was how Poliakoff zeroed in on technological changes on society and the strange but made understandable social trends of late. The hippy era thinking that has since been replaced by right-wing emphasis on selfishness/materialism is beautifully shown in many of the characters, principally Damian Lewis's anarchic business whiz. The current turmoil of "creative destruction" and how it affects one's job security is brilliantly analyzed.

Even technological progress and fads are cleverly shown, as in the Shark Tank styled pitch session for "electric books", pre-Kindle. All that's missing in the auteur's prognostication is the smart-phone mania that has set in just a few years after shooting in 2004.

One side note is how Damian Lewis's madman in business character presages his current starring role in TV's "Billions" -quite a different character, yet this BBC TV Movie certainly could have served as his audition for the later role.

I honestly thought that this was one of the greatest films I have ever had the pleasure of watching. Is it just me or are the general public getting less intelligent as I get older? It is true that in this film not everything is handed on a plate to the viewer, however, for me, this is what makes it a complete breath of fresh air. I'm quite bored with having every intricate detail of stories and characters in modern films served up to me as if I was completely mindless. This film leaves the viewer to do some thinking for a change and as part of the process it challenges their perspectives and values. We are then left with questions not only of the film but also of ourselves, which is exactly where we are supposed to be. It is is original, thought provoking and takes us back to the old art of story telling at its best.

Adam

Stephen Polliakoff's films are always interesting, even when they're not actually very good, because Polliakoff himself is interested in things that few other contemporary writers and directors are: time (he likes to tell his stories slowly) and space (they unwind in beautiful and unusual places). Unfortuantly, the specific content is often less interesting than the way that he explores it: the world he paints is aesthetically delightful, but sometimes doesn't resemble the real world very closely; 'Friends and Crocodiles', for example, is not his only film about a rich man surrounding himself with eccentric friends, in a way that seems more necessary for the purpose of the drama, than it does plausible. And this particular film is also let down by some clunky expositional dialogue (for example, when the heroine gets a new job, someone feels the need to explain that her new firm is "one of the country's largest companies"), a paper-thin satire of modern business practices, and the lack of chemistry between her character and her millionaire patron. Alan Rickman, who played a similar millionaire in his earlier film "Close My Eyes", had the charisma to pull the role off; Damian Lewis, by contrast, is flat in this movie. One weakness of both stories in the Polliakoff's tendency to centre his dramas on false (or at least, irrelevant) dichotomies, particularly that between new technology and aristocratic artifacts; but both his worlds are unreal, gorgeous and belong to the moneyed elite; I find it hard to draw any meaningful lessons from their pseudo-conflict. I suppose you don't watch Polliakoff for pure social realism, rather for the imagery as striking as shafts of light. But light has to illuminate something: in this film, it's not that clear what that something is supposed to be.