brilliantlove
****WARNING –
may contain spoilers****
Stuffed to bursting with frank, explicit sex scenes
which will get Daily Mail readers a bit hot under the collar and bore to tears
anyone else who’s over 15, Ashley Horner's bonkathon brilliantlove just isn't
that brilliant. But I suppose uneroticshitewithpointlessnudity
would've been too literal a title.
It's the steamy tale of two morons, Manchester (Liam
Browne) and Noon (Nancy Trotter Landry), who live in a garage and shag a lot. And
by a lot, I mean constantly. Inside the
garage. Outside the garage. On top of the garage. They don’t really even stop
to eat, they just grab some ice lollies from the freezer mid-hump and keep
banging away. They’re young! They’re in love! They wear skinny jeans! They’re
boring! They’re unconvincing hipster artists
with a capital A! She's a taxidermist who
stuffs the birds a local cat leaves for them. He's a photographer who
gets discovered when he gets drunk and leaves holiday snaps of her vagina in
the pub (haven’t they heard of digital photography? No-one shoots on 35mm
anymore.). Before you can say "unbelievable obvious Brit-flick
cliché" he's been
discovered by a dodgy pornographer, seduced by the Art Establishment (“His
technique is that he has no technique!” Yeah, right.) and given his own
exhibition where he ponces around drunk in guyliner and skinny jeans, insults
the intelligentsia and wees on the floor (Try doing that in
the White Cube). Meanwhile she’s
got a bit miffed that now everybody has seen her mimsy and
leaves him. Not having stuck his penis into anything for a whole 5 minutes of
screen-time, he takes matters into his own hands (fnar, fnar) and
relaxes by, ahem, “dancing with himself”. While sporting
a plastic bag over his head. As you do. Cue life-threatening masturbatory
mishap and big emotional reconciliation. There. I've just saved you 97 minutes
of your life. No need to thank me, just use them wisely.
A love story with precious little story and too much luuuuurve, brilliantlove is
like a toddler showing off her knickers at a party, determined to shock and
consequently as boring and inoffensive as it sounds. Films like 9 Songs, Romance, Anti-Christ and Shortbus
have already blurred the lines between porn and mainstream
cinema by featuring actors having non-simulated sex. brilliantlove, with
its obviously posed, fake sex scenes, is pretty tame by
comparison. There’s nothing more tedious than watching
two actors pretend to have sex. Unless the sex reveals
something about the characters internal lives or is integral to the plot,
what’s the point? It’s just titillation. And pretty pedestrian
titillation at that. If I want to be titillated, I’m only ever a mouse click
away from enough hardcore filth to make me go blind.
Profoundly unerotic, brilliantlove has
some of the most unintentionally hilarious dialogue it’s
been my misfortune to hear in a long time and there is genuinely nothing worse
than a Manc lass talking dirty (“Eeeeeugh, ye dirty bastard, ye spoonked on
me arse”). Putting in the kind of performances that are best
described as brave rather than good, Trotter Landry and
Browne never convince you that Manchester and Noon are anything more than a
ragbag of clichés and Browne in particular is so smug and irritating as
Manchester that you’d cheerfully strangle him with the ratty scarf he wears.
The script is terrible and, judging by
his grasp of narrative storytelling, screenwriter Sean Conway has obviously
been raised in a cave and has never seen a film, read a
book or heard a joke before. Perhaps the most ludicrous
aspect of the film however is Horner and Conway’s vision of the art world. Sure
it can be superficial but only in the movies would a moron like
Manchester be feted for some grubby
little shots of his girlfriend’s fanny. In reality, earnest amateur taxidermist
Noon would become the darling of the In Crowd and swept off to become the next Polly
Morgan.
Graphic and naïve, brilliantlove
desperately wants to be provocative but the only
thing it provoked in me was apathy. Along with
Bobcat Goldthwait’s World’s Greatest Dad, it is however
the second film I’ve seen this year to feature the questionable delights of
auto-erotic asphyxia which kinda makes me wonder if everyone out there but
me is into danger-wanks? As dull as it’s possible for a film featuring
acres of naked, jiggling flesh to be, brilliantlove is a
pretentious little waste of your time.
David Watson
Director
Ashley Horner
Cast
Liam Browne, Nancy Trotter Landry
Country
UK
Running time
97min
Year
2010
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