I suppose it’s merely a byproduct of world film history that 2008 brings us two films by European directors about amateur remakes of 1980s American blockbusters: first Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, and now Hammer & Tongs’s Son of Rambow. As children, this filmmaking generation witnessed the American cinema reascendant after a brief interregnum during which it looked like it might just be one among many. In this respect, if not in others, this generation is the French New Wave all over again; and these movies seem like a way of coming to grips with American cultural domination while still recognizing that culture’s formative influence on their own aesthetic, and not without a certain fondness. (Seems like we might need a word for this soon: hegemonostalgia, maybe?)
In Son of Rambow, two maladjusted British schoolboys collaborate on a submission to a BBC Screen Test competition inspired by Rambo: First Blood. Like the boys’ efforts, Son of Rambow itself has noticeable American antecedents, primarily Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, which exploits its school milieu to similar deadpan effect. But Son of Rambow is both dingier and nastier: like a cross between a Mike Leigh film and a Tom & Jerry short, it links social realism with a brutal, cartoonish sense of humor that works much better in the ambitious visual gags than in the uncertain dialogue. Luckily, the film’s flaws are offset by the two young lead actors (Will Poulter and Bill Milner), who seem miserable enough to make the underdeveloped flights of fancy around them work as pathos if not as spectacle. (Jules Sitruk, as an idolized French foreign exchange student, is also a lot of fun.) But in the end, as in Gondry’s film, sentiment beats critique: the tempered Hollywood ending suggests that Hammer & Tongs want to keep their distance from American narrative formulas, but can’t think of anything more satisfying to replace them. There’s a great film to be made with the hegemonostalgic premise, perhaps, but it has yet to appear.
by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
02 Jun 2008 9:49 PM | Submit Comment