Cinema
Sid and Nancy
(418', selected cinemas)
The young ones
Peter Ackroyd
This is a love story with the Wildean moral that 'love kills', and it concerns the relationship between Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols and Nancy Spungen, an American groupie. The turnover in pop stars and their various sensations is so swift that perhaps one ought to explain that Sid was charged with murdering Nancy in the Chelsea Hotel (it must have been her spirit I heard moaning and knocking in the radiators when I last stayed there) and subsequently died from an overdose of drugs. A modern version of 'Sikes and Nancy', in other words.
This was the time of 'punk', however, and the film is perhaps best seen as a period piece: all the young people are swearing, and breaking things, and taking drugs, and generally behaving like the spoiled children of an indulgent and deli- quescent society. It is all very noisy, but no doubt those of a humane or sensitive disposition will somehow be able to hear the 'rage' or 'despair' of the dispossessed in Thatcher's Britain. I think it was her Britain then; anyway, it was somebody's. Others may see it simply as a display of illiteracy on an enormous scale (pop music being the one industry where the rubbish rises unerringly to the surface), but pers- picacious observers such as your reviewer will find it to be in part redeemed by an innate theatricality. 'Punk' performers knew that they were vulgar and stupid; they just wanted everyone else to know; too. The music of the Sex Pistols (if this is a faithful version of it) has been subdued by the passage of time, however, and at this late date sounds quite normal; even the clothes and the hairstyles have the slightly charming inconsequence of yesterday's fashions.
Of course Sid and Nancy may have some value as a social record, assuming for the sake of argument that posterity will be more interested in a phenomenon than its contemporaries ever were; certainly the director here, Alex Cox, has proved in Repo Man that he is an expert in the more bizarre manifestations of modern capital- ism. And in fact he does manage to bring 3 curious energy to the proceedings, and he is blessed with a comic sense which pre- vents him from taking anything in front of his camera very seriously. What he has done is to turn the unpleasant story of earlY love and even earlier death into a cockney grand guignol (although I suspect that the punks originally came from the suburbs; Pinner springs to mind). He piles it all on with a vengeance, and has included everY conceivable form of teenage degradation for the delectation of the audience.
Oh yes, and there is the love story itself, conducted by means of what Wyndharn Lewis once called 'barbaric yawps'. It is not that one doesn't care for the protagon- ists — it is difficult to care for anyone paraded across the cinema screen; it is just that Sid and Nancy actively repel anY interest, and one waits with increasing impatience for their quietus. Theirs is really a modern-dress version of One Mil- lion Years BC, although the dialogue nn this occasion is less interesting. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, an updated version of Lust for Life, but nevertheless it represents a waste of Alex Cox's considerable talents. For one thing, Sid and Nancy lacks drama — and not even the most accurate biopic is 3 substitute for that precious commodity. This is rather like a documentary with a few actors hurled on board at the last minute: the two central players were con; vincing (Chloe Webb was particularly goo°
as Nancy, and should now go on to play Ethel Merman), but the rest of the cast reverted to various forms of pop stereotype. Even the predominantly youth- ful audience in the Lumiere Cinema (your reviewer being the exception) sat through it in a sort of glazed silence, no doubt happy to have missed the particular idiocies of that particular generation.
The truth may be that the whole phe- nomenon of punk was just another market- ing device which the youth of England and America, credulous as always, swallowed for the duration: yesterday it was Bob Geldof and 'Save the World', tomorrow it will be Winnie Mandela or Lyndon La Rouche. At least this would explain the hollowness of the proceedings, as well as the persistent feeling that there was no- thing real about any of it — about the violence, or the 'love', or the anger. This film is not recommended, therefore; large- ly because it's rubbish.
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