Back in the 1970s, a successful British commercials director named Ridley Scott made his feature film debut with The Duellists, a handsomely photographed costume drama set in the Napoleonic era, which was criticised in some quarters for the supposedly anachronistic casting of American actors Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine in the leading roles.
Scott, of course, went on to become one of the most successful British directors of his generation, and one can now see The Duellists as his confident calling card for a brilliant Hollywood career. The same analysis could be brought to bear on Ridley's son, Jake Scott, who makes his debut with this swashbuckling tale of highwaymen in 18th century England after some years of shooting music promos.
The MTV style is as evident in Jake's work as David Bailey's pretty-prettiness was in his father's 20 years ago, but it says something about recent changes in the British film industry that Scott junior was able to cast two rising local stars as the heroes of his brash, breezy movie.
Former Trainspotters Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller are reunited on screen as the eponymous heroes of this self-consciously hip and revisionist excursion into costume drama, with Carlyle as the tough, smart working-class Plunkett and Miller as the decadent aristocrat Macleane, whose upper-class credentials provide an entree into the London society circles the two plan to plunder.
Scott has taken Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid as an overt reference point for his portrayal of these two charming villains, and there is indeed something of the Western outlaw in their hit-and-run exploits, but Plunkett and Macleane is so packed with pastiches of other movies that it would be easy to miss any particular one. Many scenes seem to be there just to demonstrate Scott's pyro-technical abilities, while others - the ridiculous final chase sequence, in particular - seem determined by the choice of a dramatic-looking location (the film was shot in Prague, which provides a handsome, if not particularly London-ish, backdrop).
It's Scott's appropriation of 1990s Britpop style, though, which distinguishes Plunkett and Macleane from other costumed adventures. Eschewing the orchestral scores usually favoured for films set in this period, the movie is punctuated with guitar pop, electronica and, most effectively, contemporary dance music for the obligatory costumed ball. The unabashed anachronisms lend further energy to what is already a hyper-kinetic plot, while Scott's vision of 18th century society as hedonistic, violent and sexually ambiguous chimes well with the cheerfully vulgar laddism of his central characters.
There's plenty of fun to be had with the supporting cast, too. Liv Tyler has little to do other than look pretty (she must be used to it by now), but Ken Stott clearly relishes his turn as a sadistic magistrate, and Alan Cumming does a fine impression of Boy George as the dandified Lord Rochester. Hugh Linehan
Tea With Mussolini (PG) General release
Watching Franco Zeffirelli's latest film is a strange experience. One could easily be discovering some forgotten, never-seen relic of Italian middlebrow cinema of the late 1960s, were it not for the presence of a formidable cast of old troupers of the 1990s variety. But Zeffirelli's amiable, very old-fashioned melodrama relies for most of its effect on Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Lily Tomlin and Cher, as expatriate art lovers who defy the impending clouds of war to remain in Florence before, and during, the second World War.
Seen through the eyes of a young, illegitimate Italian boy (Baird Wallace) who finds himself adopted by the group, Tea With Mussolini certainly offers plenty of opportunity for its grandes dames to make an impression. Smith is Lady Hester, the haughty aristocrat with a soft spot for Mussolini, who believes her success early on in securing an audience with the fascist leader (the tea of the title) will guarantee the group's safety.
Dench is the highly-strung poetess, Plowright the sensible mother-figure, Tomlin the butch archaeologist (who seems to be modelled on Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones) and Cher the wealthy American with a heart of gold and an eye for handsome men. All of them handle these cliched roles with some gusto, although surprisingly, it's Cher who emerges as the most memorable of the bunch, even if her character's progression from dilettante to anti-fascist heroine is a little hard to swallow.
Swanning around in a series of extravagant costumes, her diva-esque persona seems most in tune with Zeffirelli's own preferences, and she has fun with the campness of the whole thing. "Are all American women as exciting as you?" asks one handsome suitor. "Alas, no," she replies, with perfect timing.
Indeed, campness threatens to engulf the story at any moment. The languid youths draped decoratively in the background of many scenes remind us that this is definitely a Zeffirelli film, as does the peculiar sub-plot about Smith's nephew (Paul Chequer), forced to dress in drag for three years to evade the attention of the fascists. It's a very elderly sort of campness, though - you feel there's nothing here which wouldn't have been done exactly the same way 30 years ago, from design to music to lighting.
Nothing necessarily wrong with that - Zeffirelli shows blithe disregard for changing cinema-tographic styles, and with its milky blacks and bleached sepias, his film looks as if it was shot on stock hidden in a Cinecitta attic since the mid-1960s. Implausible, sentimental and often deeply silly, Tea with Mussolini nonetheless possesses a certain fusty charm that almost carries it through. Hugh Linehan
I Stand Alone/Seul Contre Tous (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin, from tomorrow
A palpable anger permeates Seul Contre Tous, the startling first feature from the 35-year-old writer-director Gaspar Noe and a sequel to his 1991 extended short film, Carne, a Cannes prize-winner. Both centre on a butcher, Jean Chevalier (Philippe Nahon) whose traumatic past is recounted in an extended rapid-fire prologue before the new film picks up his story in 1980. Orphaned during the war, he was sexually abused as a child and later imprisoned for attacking an immigrant he accused - wrongly - of sexually assaulting his autistic daughter.
Now unemployed and wholly dependent on his heavily pregnant lover, Chevalier is a deeply frustrated and hate-filled man - avowedly racist, misogynistic and homophobic. He is brutally, appallingly violent towards his lover and lusts after his mute teenage daughter. Like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and the Michael Douglas character in Falling Down, he suffers from an aching sense of failure and feels entirely dislocated from society.
Bemoaning that he has nothing to show for 35 years of work, he believes his country to be nothing but "ruins and unemployment". As his rage gathers momentum and he spouts torrents of invective in the movie's stream-of-consciousness voiceover, Chevalier is like a human time bomb about to explode. Philippe Nahon's robust, expressive performance captures him in all his monstrousness - and all his hopelessness.
Noe's ferociously caustic picture even carries on-screen warnings alerting the audience to, and counting down to, the horrors it's about to depict. Those warnings are fully justified in the case of this utterly uncompromised and harrowing picture of a delusional, demented man cracking up. Seul Contre Tous is an overwhelmingly bleak experience that is openly manipulative and deliberately disturbing, but made with an undeniable sense of conviction - and of cinema. Michael Dwyer
Blast From The Past (12) General release
A mildly diverting romantic comedy which brings together characters rather archly named Adam and Eve, Blast From the Past is a traditional fish-out-of-water yarn which is essentially a spin on the time-travel movie. Adam, like-ably played by Brendan Fraser - in a role not far removed from his part in George of the Jungle - is ?????????????ive and an innocent who has spent the first 35 years of his life cocooned in a bomb shelter built by his scientist father (a wacky Christopher Walken) during the heightened paranoia of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
Born in the shelter, Adam has never met anyone other than his mother (Sissy Spacek) and father, who have raised him as a typically clean-cut, all-American boy of the early 1960s. When the shelter locks are opened after 35 years and Adam is sent into Los Angeles to stock up on provisions, he is astonished by this world of rap, guns, cross-dressers and adult video stores. Eve, played by Alicia Silverstone, is a street-smart young woman whose experiences with men have made her thoroughly cynical about love, and when she meets Adam, he seems just too good to be true. The audience is, of course, many steps ahead of her at this point, anticipating the inevitable - which is arrived at in an altogether obvious and predictable narrative set-up.
The fun, as ever in time-travel movies, is in the shock of the new as the guileless stranger in town attempts to assimilate his bizarre new surroundings, and let's face it, things don't really get much more bizarre than late 1990s Los Angeles. Directed in rudimentary fashion by Hugh Wilson, this nostalgia-steeped movie is at its most entertaining in a night-club sequence when Adam gets to demonstrate his dancing skills to the swing music he was reared on and is now back in fashion all over again. Michael Dwyer
Please note that some cinemas are closed today, Good Friday.
