Cinema
Magic circles
Peter Ackroyd
Gregory's Girl ('A', selected cinemas) Gregory is a tall, gawky, larky sort of boy, his features irradiated by an absent-minded cheerfulness; he has the slow, shambling walk of an adolescent but his steps are occasionally quickened into wild leaps or moments of exuberant dancing. He is a prey to sudden, violent enthusiasms. He makes up elaborate stories on the spur of the moment to justify anything he might have said. For breakfast, he eats Bonio biscuits covered with cheese spread. He is, in other words, slightly ridiculous (one shudders to think how he will cope with adulthood) and extremely charming — in the line of suburban heroes, from Just William to Billy Liar.
Gregory's Girl is set in Cumbernauld New Town, outside Glasgow, and most of the action takes place in a local comprehensive. But the suburb and the school have been touched by magic; in a small modern bedroom a girl is reading A Midsummer Night's Dream and in the classroom a boy is reciting from Twelfth Night. As the summer's twilight descends upon the town, the streets and houses glow like a heap of gold which had been hidden and is now suddenly uncovered.
This is, in fact, a modern fairy story full of generous and high-spirited people, inhabiting a world where their generosity will never be damaged and their high spirits never destroyed. The children follow their bright, particular stars; one boy is interested only in cooking pastry, another is obsessed with odd but true 'facts' — how fast a sneeze travels, the ratio of men to women in Caracas. They slouch along the road discussing such matters, and are generally followed by small children who add a piping commentary of their own. The adults themselves behave like children, filled with naive enthusiasms or overwhelmed by sudden fits of the giggles. The headmaster plays `dixie' tunes on the school piano. When a window cleaner interrupts a class,the young schoolmistress opens the window and starts chatting to him; he cleans her glasses for her.
The essential story — the pentameter, as it were, around which the poetry accumulates — concerns a girl who has joined the school football team. She has the clear, blank features of a Botticelli angel, but this girl is very determined, very 'modern', as Greg ory puts it. He immediately falls in love with her, and they engage in desultory but suffocating conversation: 'I don't bruise easily,' she tells him in the changing room. 'I do,' he replies, 'I bruise like a peach.' The film is suffused with adolescent sexuality — the girls tending to be more knowing and less coy, while the boys are always soppier and more innocent; they are lost in an agony of words whenever a girl approaches them. Real, adult sexuality is introduced only obliquely and comically, as if it were some kind of secret joke.
None of this, of course, bears much relation to any conceivable reality — it is difficult to believe, for example, that a comprehensive school just outside Glasgow would be quite the innocent jungle which it is here presented as being. But that doesn't matter: the film is an essay in fantasy, and as such it is brilliantly sustained. The young people in the film, drawn mainly from the Glasgow Youth Theatre, prove that acting is like swimming — the earlier it is learned the better; and the script is excellent. Gregory's Girl is one of those rare films which imparts an air of enchantment to the ordinary world, and in which no awkward moment intervenes to break the spell. At the end, Gregory lies on the ground and jiggles his arms and legs, as if he were dancing. He tells the girl with him that the earth is spinning at a thousand miles per hour. 'A lot of people panic. And then they fall off.' As he talks, the camera turns so that it seems as if he is revolving in a magic circle — and, indeed, for the time being, he is.
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