Cinema
The boy friends
Kenneth Robinson
A Bigger Splash Director: Jack Hazan Stars: David Hockney and friends. 'X' Paris Pullman, Times Baker Street (105 mins).
I've given up going to film press shows. It's much more fun seeing a picture with the audience it was meant for. I've already mentioned the auditorium full of obvious anarchists who went to a showing of the Italian political film, Black Holiday. Then there was the noisily-wrong audience that turned LIP on a Saturday night for Doctor in the Nude. They didn't get the expected cast from the television comedies, but a very unfunny French thriller — though this didn't stop them laughing in the wrong places for the first fifteen minutes.
But my favourite audience in the last few weeks was the one watching a film about the elderly Duncan Grant. Mr Grant, it was obvious, had a lot of socially-acceptable admirers and they all spoke terribly-terribly well of his paintings. This didn't antagonise anyone until the names of contributors-appeared at the end. And then a large section of the audience protested with Whistles and boos. I'm not going to be unkind enough to tell you the name that caused the trouble. It's worth going to the Academy Cinema to find out for yourself.
The David Hockney film, A Bigger Splash, is. now showing at the Paris Pullman. This cinema is in Chelsea so, of course, the audience know what they are in for. Or do they: I'm not sure if they were laughing in the right places on Sunday night. Or, in fact, if they were meant to be laughing at all. The trouble with David Hockney, the star of this semi-documentary about his own paintings and lifestyle, is that he looks and sounds like Alan Bennett doing a send-up, in BBC Monitor fashion, of the Artist and the Man. Not that this film has anything of the old Monitor technique. It is, in fact, so unhelpful it makes me regret the passing of the Huw Wheldon approach to art. It's the sort of picture that reminds me of a recent comment by Benny Green, who said he liked a film to make it worth his while to stay away from things he would rather be doing. Though I must say I'm grateful to director Jack Hazan for the trouble he has taken to show me the real David Hockney. And so should you be. Because by the time I've told YOU all about him you needn't bother to see the film for yourself.
If you do see it you won't, Perhaps, get the same sort of audience as I shared it with. This is essentially a boys' film, largely because Hockney and his friends shown here are, of course, all boys — with one exception. (Maybe two exceptions, though I couldn't be too sure.) The lad in front of me had a lovely bouffant hair style and he kept putting his fingers in it during the rude bits of the film. So I was lucky enough to miss most of them. Not dreadfully rude, of course. You can only get away with that sort of thing if you have girls undressing as well as boys. But the director certainly has a tendency to sneak uP behind the lithe young men and isolate some of their least important features in near close-ups, sometimes on bicycle saddles (fully clothed) and sometimes resting on the sides of swimming pools (unclothed) looking like hunks of pallid pork.
Two of Mr Hockney's friends are seen together in what critics like to call an explicit scene. But apart from a bit of grunting and a
soundtrack that makes the caress
ing of buttocks seem like a sandPapering operation, there is noth ing much to worry about. Just . enough to prevent you taking
anYone you like or respect to the film.
Many of the characters are, for much of the film, fully dressed and in their right minds. Which isn't saying a lot. One of them behaves like Kenneth Williams doing his most camp impersonation and has the cinema in a delighted uproar. The others — all real-life buddies of Hockney — are so unmemorable in looks and dialogue that I couldn't remember who was which, and which of them were supposed to be most fond of somebody or other. There was a lot of chat about Hockney being deserted by a great love. This was said to be the sort of thing that was "likely to upset more than two people." But as Hockney himself kept on wearing his impeccable Jimmy Saville expression, occasionally wrinkling his chin up to his nose and smiling cheesily at the same time, it didn't seem that he could possibly be one of the upset people.
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