Chris Knipp
03-25-2015, 04:06 PM
Lone Scherfig: The Riot Club (2014)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/r1C.jpg
Rude play among young English toffs
Lone Scherfig’s The Riot Club, adapted from Laura Wade’s play Posh, is about a centuries old highly elite little Oxford drinking society (perhaps based on the actual Bullington Club) whose members are very upper class. A thing that still matters deeply in England. Let's take the positive tack to this somewhat controversial piece, and say with the urbane Peter Debruge of Variety (http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/r1C.jpg), that Scherfig approaches this milieu, as a woman and a Dane as well as merely not a toff, "with shrewd anthropological wit." But at the same time we acknowledge the criticism from those comparing the film with Laura Wade's successful Royal Court Theatre play (adapted here by the author), that the satire has been softened in the interest of feeding sympathy for these young men. The camera after all loves them, and one of them says their choice of a new member is the "prettiest" candidate: some of the actors are indeed pretty young men, and they all look fine in their tail coats at the tavern dinner that's the main focus of the play, much embroidered by Oxford university scenes for the screen. Certainly for some of us these are people we love to hate. Both the before and after of the play's main event dinner are expanded considerably by Wade and work well thus. We must acknowledge that the film has a momentum and growing sense of dread and repulsion that are neatly modulated. But we may have seen keener and bracingly crueler delineations of British class snobbery. This is not a masterpiece. It is simply a well made movie about a juicy subject rarely so well dramatized in such an effective blend of the theatrical and the cinematic.
The club is an opportunity for extreme sowing of wild oats. But it has an other function: it's the oldest and most gilt-edged of old school ties. Members are granted connections that serve for life. Presently the issue is that there are only eight undergraduate members and the club needs at least ten to feel viable. They like two first year students and public school boys, Miles (Max Irons), who ateneded Westminster, and Alistair (Sam Claflin), who has the stigma of having gone to Harrow (Eton is the preferred school), but whose older brother was a Riot Club president considered "legendary." Miles arrives for first year at Oxford with liberal ideas and at once plunges into an affair with a Northern working class girl, Lauren (Holliday Grainger). Maybe it's just sexual tourism. At least he's pleased when he passes the club hazing and testing and is invited to the club bacchanal in the private dining room of a rural pub called The Bull's Head. The sex worker they have hired for the evening, Charlie (Natalie Dormer) refuses to perform on them en masse and leaves. As a nasty trick someone texts Lauren on Miles' phone to come and "rescue" Miles, and their insulting behavior toward her when she comes deeply offends Miles, as does all that follows.
As the evening gets uglier and more violent the club members more and more reveal not only an obscene sense of entitlement but a bitter hatred of the poor. Miles becomes more alienated from his study mate Alistair, with whom he's already been politically at odds, but now as it were also socially. Miles' good looks, we learn, have attracted the club's older gay member Hugo (Sam Reid) as far back as when they were both at Westminster.
As Debruge points out, this film could be relatable for the audiences of both The Social Network ant The Skull and much of the lead-up initiation action, all the boys' behavior, is in a sense just a "poncier" version of American fraternity hazing. But this is no fraternity. It was founded to honor a 17th-century Lord Riot (the appropriateness of the name an obvious "coincidence"), knifed to death by a professor whose wife he was screwing, which we see in an elegantly pornographic flashback. The tradition is to spend an evening indulging to an extreme and then trash the premises, reimbursing the unsuspecting owners. But the evening banquet, inaugurating Miles' and Alistair's membership, turns out to be more, and worse, than that -- a hideous nightmare of escalating violence. For the viewer any attraction to the privileged youths turns to revulsion.
All the actors in the principal roles are good; the secondary club members, not so memorable and perhaps a bit shrill, except for the always distinctive Olly Alexander. Max Irons is particularly well chosen as the sensitive one, the one through whom we see and feel events, and Irons (son of Jeremy) distinguishes himself. Wade's self-adaptation, with Scherfig's realization, successfully open up the play, which is mainly a chamber piece focused on the dinner. The long, post-dinner denouement is surprisingly good, a fitting follow-through in the "shrewd anthropological" approach that shows after severe testing how the constants of class and immunity at the top here remain immutable. The final line of dialogue is a apt and resonant summation: "People like us don't make mistakes, do we?"
Brits understand, and describe, all this better, of course, so see Caherine Shoard in The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/sep/06/the-riot-club-review-bullingdon).
The Riot Club. 107 mins., debuted at Toronto 6 September 2014, and opened in England, Ireland and Italy shortly thereafter. It has also been shown at various international festivals. I viewed it as part of the February 2015 Mostly British festival in San Francisco (which featured Scherfig’s admired debut feature An Education five years ago). Some bad US reviews led to a Metacritic rating of 55%, and in France the AlloCiné press rating was only 2.9. But I liked it and so did Stephen Holden in The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/27/movies/review-in-the-riot-club-an-elite-british-dining-club-excels-in-debauchery.html?), and so even did Maryann Johanson, "The Filck Filosopher (http://www.flickfilosopher.com/2014/09/riot-club-movie-review-bad-boys-never-lose.html)." Its limited US theatrical (plus VOD) release by IFC started 27 March 2015.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/r1C.jpg
Rude play among young English toffs
Lone Scherfig’s The Riot Club, adapted from Laura Wade’s play Posh, is about a centuries old highly elite little Oxford drinking society (perhaps based on the actual Bullington Club) whose members are very upper class. A thing that still matters deeply in England. Let's take the positive tack to this somewhat controversial piece, and say with the urbane Peter Debruge of Variety (http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/r1C.jpg), that Scherfig approaches this milieu, as a woman and a Dane as well as merely not a toff, "with shrewd anthropological wit." But at the same time we acknowledge the criticism from those comparing the film with Laura Wade's successful Royal Court Theatre play (adapted here by the author), that the satire has been softened in the interest of feeding sympathy for these young men. The camera after all loves them, and one of them says their choice of a new member is the "prettiest" candidate: some of the actors are indeed pretty young men, and they all look fine in their tail coats at the tavern dinner that's the main focus of the play, much embroidered by Oxford university scenes for the screen. Certainly for some of us these are people we love to hate. Both the before and after of the play's main event dinner are expanded considerably by Wade and work well thus. We must acknowledge that the film has a momentum and growing sense of dread and repulsion that are neatly modulated. But we may have seen keener and bracingly crueler delineations of British class snobbery. This is not a masterpiece. It is simply a well made movie about a juicy subject rarely so well dramatized in such an effective blend of the theatrical and the cinematic.
The club is an opportunity for extreme sowing of wild oats. But it has an other function: it's the oldest and most gilt-edged of old school ties. Members are granted connections that serve for life. Presently the issue is that there are only eight undergraduate members and the club needs at least ten to feel viable. They like two first year students and public school boys, Miles (Max Irons), who ateneded Westminster, and Alistair (Sam Claflin), who has the stigma of having gone to Harrow (Eton is the preferred school), but whose older brother was a Riot Club president considered "legendary." Miles arrives for first year at Oxford with liberal ideas and at once plunges into an affair with a Northern working class girl, Lauren (Holliday Grainger). Maybe it's just sexual tourism. At least he's pleased when he passes the club hazing and testing and is invited to the club bacchanal in the private dining room of a rural pub called The Bull's Head. The sex worker they have hired for the evening, Charlie (Natalie Dormer) refuses to perform on them en masse and leaves. As a nasty trick someone texts Lauren on Miles' phone to come and "rescue" Miles, and their insulting behavior toward her when she comes deeply offends Miles, as does all that follows.
As the evening gets uglier and more violent the club members more and more reveal not only an obscene sense of entitlement but a bitter hatred of the poor. Miles becomes more alienated from his study mate Alistair, with whom he's already been politically at odds, but now as it were also socially. Miles' good looks, we learn, have attracted the club's older gay member Hugo (Sam Reid) as far back as when they were both at Westminster.
As Debruge points out, this film could be relatable for the audiences of both The Social Network ant The Skull and much of the lead-up initiation action, all the boys' behavior, is in a sense just a "poncier" version of American fraternity hazing. But this is no fraternity. It was founded to honor a 17th-century Lord Riot (the appropriateness of the name an obvious "coincidence"), knifed to death by a professor whose wife he was screwing, which we see in an elegantly pornographic flashback. The tradition is to spend an evening indulging to an extreme and then trash the premises, reimbursing the unsuspecting owners. But the evening banquet, inaugurating Miles' and Alistair's membership, turns out to be more, and worse, than that -- a hideous nightmare of escalating violence. For the viewer any attraction to the privileged youths turns to revulsion.
All the actors in the principal roles are good; the secondary club members, not so memorable and perhaps a bit shrill, except for the always distinctive Olly Alexander. Max Irons is particularly well chosen as the sensitive one, the one through whom we see and feel events, and Irons (son of Jeremy) distinguishes himself. Wade's self-adaptation, with Scherfig's realization, successfully open up the play, which is mainly a chamber piece focused on the dinner. The long, post-dinner denouement is surprisingly good, a fitting follow-through in the "shrewd anthropological" approach that shows after severe testing how the constants of class and immunity at the top here remain immutable. The final line of dialogue is a apt and resonant summation: "People like us don't make mistakes, do we?"
Brits understand, and describe, all this better, of course, so see Caherine Shoard in The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/sep/06/the-riot-club-review-bullingdon).
The Riot Club. 107 mins., debuted at Toronto 6 September 2014, and opened in England, Ireland and Italy shortly thereafter. It has also been shown at various international festivals. I viewed it as part of the February 2015 Mostly British festival in San Francisco (which featured Scherfig’s admired debut feature An Education five years ago). Some bad US reviews led to a Metacritic rating of 55%, and in France the AlloCiné press rating was only 2.9. But I liked it and so did Stephen Holden in The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/27/movies/review-in-the-riot-club-an-elite-british-dining-club-excels-in-debauchery.html?), and so even did Maryann Johanson, "The Filck Filosopher (http://www.flickfilosopher.com/2014/09/riot-club-movie-review-bad-boys-never-lose.html)." Its limited US theatrical (plus VOD) release by IFC started 27 March 2015.