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July-August 1999 In the late Middle Ages - the Age of Chivalry - there was a fashion for making maps that charted the path of True Love: maps that led through Deserts of Loneliness and Sloughs of Despair to Plains of Happiness (and sometimes Peaks of Bliss). We’re a bit more cynical these days, but you could still make up a kind of 20th-century ‘Atlas of Love’, the difference being that the course of true love would run differently in different cities. It might be edgy in New York, perverse in Madrid, complex in Paris, flamboyant in Berlin, crazy in London... But the craziest map of all would belong to the trendy inner-city London enclave of Camden with its street markets and music venues, moneyed chic and artistic poverty, ethnic restaurants and canals. Venice it ain’t, however, and This Year’s Love - the new British film set in Camden - is no Romeo and Juliet tale of romantic love tragically thwarted. Here, the lovers are not so much star-crossed as screwed up, and it’s confusion rather than tragedy that gets in the way of a happy ending. All of the seven main characters in This Year’s Love are searching for happiness (aren’t we all?) and, in the process, drift in and out of relationships with one another over a three-year period. Like most of us, they get it wrong more often than they get it right, and happiness is the outcome in only just under half the cases. The result is funny, but edgy-funny rather than funny-ha-ha. This Year’s Love starts with a rush to get to the church on time, but any similarity with Four Weddings and a Funeral stops there: the marriage in question - between Hannah and Danny - lasts just 37 minutes. It falls apart when Danny discovers who Hannah slept with last week (his Best Man), flings the wedding cake against the wall and storms out onto the street. It is a high-energy opening, mixing comedy and emotional pain, paving the way for what will be a high-energy film. And much of that energy is drawn from the fact that the entire movie was shot on location last April - the coldest, wettest April for 100 years - in and around Camden. "Camden is so funky, has some of the best clubs and hippest bands in London, and the market is incredibly flamboyant and colourful," says the film’s (American-born) producer, Michele Camarda. "We worked very hard to find locations that showed the distinctive personality of the area. Camden is a place where young, arty people live, and we’ve tried to celebrate it in the film in the way that New York film-makers celebrate Greenwich Village and Soho." "Camden has an eclectic feel to it, like the film’s characters," says David Kane, who both wrote and directed This Year’s Love. "It’s like a village within London, and the fact that all the characters live there makes all the coincidences more believable." But This Year’s Love is not about arty inner-London villages. It’s about people - seven of them: three guys and four girls. That should already tell you that the ending is not going to be entirely happy, because two into seven don’t go. Here’s what happens to each of them (in alphabetical order of the actors playing them, just like they’re listed on the credits). Marey , who cleans airports and sings in a band Marey is the only one of the seven characters to have been born and bred in Camden: a working-class Londoner with a dead-end job cleaning Heathrow Airport’s Terminal Four, but whose main source of pleasure is singing with a band in a pub. Marey meets Danny when he turns up at Terminal Four with a spare ticket to Jamaica (his former other half’s honeymoon treat) and offers it to her. But he’s too drunk to be allowed on the plane, so they end up drinking some more and going to bed together. It doesn’t last. Nor does Marey’s fling with Cameron or her liaison with Liam. But she probably comes out of it all stronger than most of them because she’s more grounded. Marey is played by Kathy Burke, who won Best Actress at Cannes in 1998 for her role as the abused wife in Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth, but is best known to British audiences as Perry, sidekick of hormonal adolescent Kevin in the TV show Harry Enfield and Chums, which is shortly to be turned into a feature film. Burke was also seen last year as Mary Tudor in the historical drama Elizabeth and as Maggie in Dancing at Lughnasa. “I can relate to Marey quite a lot,” admits Burke. “All that being self-conscious and not being happy about her weight and her looks - knowing she’s not a pretty girl and that she has to rely on her personality and being funny. “I’ve known David [Kane, the writer/director] for about eight years. I’d seen a film that he’d done for ‘Screen Two’ called Shadow of the Earth, which I’d loved. I was just a fan, really, and if he had plays on, I’d go and see them. He became a friend and, a couple of years ago, he said he wanted to write something set around Camden. “David was one of the first people I phoned up when I got that award at Cannes, because I wondered if it would help him finance the film.” Sophie, who lives on a barge Sophie could possibly have been born in Camden - the posh bit up towards Regents Park - but she’s now a single mother with an eight-year-old son, living on a barge in rebellion against her parents. She meets up with Liam in the local cyber cafe and has a brief, unsuccessful relationship with him. Then she meets Danny in his women-only tattooing parlour, ‘Pricks and Chicks’, and ends up in bed with him. Last in line is Cameron, whom she introduces to her parents and almost marries - until she ‘connects’ with an aromatherapist called Tarquin. Sophie is played by Jennifer Ehle, best known for her TV work in such prestige drama productions as Pride and Prejudice (she played Elizabeth Bennett). But she has also had major film roles in Backbeat (as John Lennon’s wife, Cynthia), Wilde (as Constance) and Rose Troche’s Bedrooms and Hallways (as Sally). She will soon be seen opposite Ralph Fiennes in Istvan Szabo’s A Taste of Sunshine. “Sophie is very much trying to find someone to be with without letting them in,” says Ehle. “I think she can’t quite come to terms with the fact that she has to open up in order for that to happen. You get a bit of balance with Cameron towards the end, but she has not relinquished him any kind of control. “The script captured a side of London that I hadn’t seen portrayed in a film. It was very urban, sexy and funny. The characters aren’t particularly healthy, and you watch them make mistakes again and again. It’s a comedy of errors. “Sophie is a departure for me in that I have recently played a lot of very warm, loving women who stand by their man no matter what. Sophie is very different - she is standing by herself.” Liam, who's useless at sex Liam is the closest to the edge of all the characters - unable to handle Sophie; driven to suicidal despair when Hannah dumps him for a lesbian relationship; and unable even to deal on level terms with Marey, to whom he introduces himself by saying he’s useless at sex. The only thing he cares about are the collectors’-item comics which he sells for a living. Liam is played by Ian Hart, the hard-working and increasingly successful young Liverpudlian actor who manages to look totally different in every film - whether as John Lennon in Backbeat; as the dedicated young teacher in Clockwork Mice (for which he won an Evening Standard Award); as the revolutionary hero of Ken Loach’s Spanish Civil War drama Land and Freedom; as Joe O’Reilly in Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins; or as the absent dad in Michael Winterbottom’s 1999 Cannes competition entry, Wonderland. Hart will next be seen in the as-yet untitled comedy which is producer Uberto Pasolini’s first film since The Full Monty; and the screen adaptation of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, again for Neil Jordan. “Liam doesn’t know where he fits in with women,” says Hart. “Maybe he did once, but you have one or two bad relationships and, like they say, it’s hard to get back on the horse. By the time he meets Marey, the damage has already been done: he’s had an unrequited love life and has been chucked and chucked. “I used to live in a flat in Camden. The landlady was Greek and she didn’t speak English. I kept trying to tell her that I had got an acting job in York and I’d be away for six weeks, but when I got back she had changed the locks and put all my stuff out in the garden! “But Camden is a great place: the canal is genius. It’s also a good place to go out when you don’t have much money - like me when I first arrived in London. And it’s great that we didn’t have to make it for the film: we just found it and adapted it.” Danny, who does tatoos If any one character is at the centre of This Year’s Love, it is Danny, who sets events in motion by terminating his marriage to Hannah, then bounces from relationship to relationship - from Marey to Sophie - before beginning the open-ended process of reconciliation with Hannah on which the film ends. Danny is the epitome of the Camden crowd: a nice enough guy with an unusual career - he is a not very successful tattoo artist - who makes all the wrong decisions, especially when his (very short) fuse has burned out. Danny is played by Douglas Henshall, who has become one of the most familiar faces on British television, most recently as the male lead in the controversial medical series Psychos. His film roles include the low-budget comedy Fast Food, If Only (aka The Man With Rain in His Shoes), and fellow Scottish actor Peter Mullan’s directorial debut, Orphans. “For Danny,” says Henshall, “the film deals with his trying to lose his sexual jealousy, insecurity, paranoia and overall lack of trust that stems from losing Hannah. To make it worse, he’s still in love with her, and that just adds another layer of complicated emotions for him to deal with. “The story is based around a group of people in their late 20s, but I think someone of just about any age would connect with it: most people do go in and out of relationships before they meet the person they think they’re supposed to be with. “I really liked the story with all the humour and humanity it contained, and that nice kind of circular thing where everyone bumps into everyone else. And I also liked the way that everything hasn’t been tied up in a pink ribbon at the end - it’s left open, but still hopeful.” Cameron, who paints copies of dogs Cameron is in thrall to his good looks: he can charm almost any girl who is halfway open to being charmed, but he’s never going to stick around long enough to have a relationship. He is the first to pick up Hannah (drunk, in the pub, on her wedding night), but is not ready to be domesticated by her. He probably thinks he is doing Marey a favour by sleeping with her - and, as a result, gets his come-uppance. But it is Sophie who really hurts him. For the record, Cameron is an artist who paints exact copies of whatever appeals to him and (sometimes) sells them at auction. Cameron is played by Dougray Scott, a young Scottish actor poised on the brink of stardom. His first high-profile role was in Gillies MacKinnon’s Regeneration, but then he went to Hollywood to play Prince Charming in the Cinderella story, Ever After, and followed up This Year’s Love with a stint in Mission: Impossible 2. As noted in this issue’s ‘Hollywood Notes’, his next Hollywood role will be as the long-clawed Wolverine in The X-Men. “Cameron is an artist and lives his life like one of his heroes, Egon Schiele,” says Scott. “He spends his time looking at lonely hearts columns and meeting three or four women a week, and has no qualms about dumping them because he believes he’s going to die young. “The thing about artists is the ‘organised’ mess: their life is very structured and planned out. It looks like it’s haphazard, but it takes years to make a studio look that messy! And Hannah comes along and sweeps the floor and Cameron’s thinking, ‘You don’t know how long it took me to make it look like that!’ “The whole film is about people deconstructing their lives and putting the pieces back and trying to find some sort of happiness in life - which is really what everyone’s lives are about. There are people like that all over the world.” Hannah, who's a bit barmy Hannah is the most straightforward and vulnerable of the main characters. She is devastated when her wedding comes to an abrupt halt, gets drunk, ends up in bed with Cameron but spends most of the night throwing up in the bathroom. Her relationship with Liam never really gets started. She is sufficiently open to experience to end up in bed with Alice. But the reconciliation with Danny - when he shows up at her supermarket checkout and declares his love in front of all the other shoppers - is one of the film’s most touching moments. Hannah is played by Catherine McCormack, whose first major film role was as William Wallace’s murdered sweetheart in Braveheart. She also had a role in David Leland’s wartime drama, Land Girls. But it was while she was filming Dancing at Lughnasa with Kathy Burke (not to mention Meryl Streep) that Burke suggested her to director Kane for This Year’s Love. “I didn’t really base Hannah on anyone but me,” admits McCormack. “I let my madder side come out and had a laugh with it. There are some very dark moments in the film, though: it’s about people’s breakdowns and what happens to them at certain times of their lives. “The wedding is great: it’s a brilliant opener with some wonderful scenes. It’s a bit like Strictly Ballroom - OTT costumes and larger than life. “I wanted to be part of the film because I hadn’t done comedy and I think I’m more suited to playing character roles than the costume-drama romantic parts I’ve played until now. “David came over to Ireland where we were filming Dancing at Lughnasa because he’d written one of the parts for Kathy, and she said that he should get me to do a part. She thought I was a bit barmy.” And finally Alice, who isn't like the others Alice is the only character in This Year’s Love who has only one relationship: with Hannah. But she is just like the others in another respect: it doesn’t last. Alice is played by Emily Woof, one of the more experienced cast members, who made her film debut opposite Rufus Sewell in The Woodlanders; was Robert Carlyle’s ex-wife in The Full Monty; and played Ewan McGregor’s new partner in Velvet Goldmine. Since This Year’s Love, she has starred in Aussie biopic Passion, which was featured in our last issue. “Alice is really the only truly positive one of all the characters - positive about who and what she wants,” says Woof. “She comes into the film halfway through and starts to have a relationship with Hannah. It then all peters out because of Liam, so she sort of comes in and breezes out again. “The whole film is very funky, funny, fresh and... I can’t think of any more words beginning with ‘F’ except a rude one that doesn’t apply.” © 1999 Preview |
