This Beautiful Fantastic

[machotrouts]

This Beautiful Fantastic (2016).





Written and directed by Simon Aboud (Paul McCartney's son-in-law, apparently), and starring Jessica Brown Findlay (off of Downton Abbey, apparently), Tom Wilkinson (this poor sod used to get nominated for Oscars), Andrew Scott (who also spent 2016 getting called a cunt and thrown off a roof by M in Spectre), and Jeremy Irvine (the white guy from that Stonewall film everyone hated).

The title sounds like a Diana Vickers album track, but don't worry, it's much more annoying than that.

It's a film you might call "quirky", but only in a pejorative sense – there are very few actual quirks to be found here. It seems to have been universally met with 3-star reviews comparing it to Amélie, which is everyone's polite way of saying "this is really saccharine and annoying, but we think it's on purpose". I liked Amélie as a child and I don't know whether it'd hold up today, but I remember it as a film relentlessly packed with ideas (I don't remember whether they're good ideas or not, but ideas nonetheless). If Amélie was mentioned when this was being pitched, it's hard to imagine how they could have made a flattering comparison. "What we want to make, right, is the twee and grating tone you're worried Amélie would have if you tried to watch it again in the 2010s, and absolutely none of the things you liked about it." Or, "imagine Amélie, but even whiter!"

It's about a posh girl doing some gardening.


The characters, and plot, are as follows:

Bella.



"Bella Brown", begins the narrator. "Well, what can I say?" Fucking don't ask me, you're the narrator. "There was nothing normal about the girl." This is to say: she wears hats and is quite neat, the crazy feral bitch.

Our protagonist, who, in this opening narration, is also referred to as a "strange creature" and "the oddest of oddballs", implicitly suffers from OCD (i.e. we get the odd shot here and there of her methodically arranging peas on a plate), and her house is supposedly spotless and in meticulous order. (This was ruined for me only 2 minutes in after I saw a bit of crust on her toothpaste tube. I mean, there are bigger problems here, but you are playing with fire making "rigorous attention to detail" one of your lead character's defining traits.)

She was abandoned at birth and, we are told, rescued by kindly ducks. A claim like that would be all well and good if the pace of the film didn't allow any scrutiny, but the tone is not nearly surreal enough to accommodate it. It's like Simon Aboud thought "I need something that sounds like a charmingly whimsical origin story... eh, how about 'raised by ducks'. That's fucking stupid but I'll remember to take it out in a few drafts' time." Then he forgot because he was too busy spunking up some Beatle spawn.

Bella's job is filing in a library, but she refers to herself as a writer, and her ambition is to write children's books. The only thing that's stopping her is that she doesn't have any ideas. Literally, she has no story, no characters, nothing. Well, what the fuck? Does she want to get into it because it's a good fucking PR move or what? Is she David fucking Walliams? I'd question how anyone could be truly motivated by a burning creative desire when they've got absolutely nothing to say, but then this film exists.

Bella is scared of plants, and has left her garden in disarray. Her curmudgeonly neighbour reports her to her landlord, who gives her one month to make it nice under threat of eviction. That's the plot.

Largely devoid of agency, her role is to ricochet between the following men.


Alfred.



The crotchety tyrant next door.





Not sure you're allowed to have that line in such a conspicuously white film.

Initially played as a cantankerous fist-shaking old man from a children's cartoon, he gradually softens as he helps Bella with the gardening, and they come to understand and like each other. His character arc is that he goes from saying things like "snap out of it!" in a mean way, to saying "snap out of it!" in a caring way. The Gammon with a Heart of Gold only dobbed her in because he loves gardens, not because he despises the mentally ill.

He dies at the end.

Not much about this film is cinematographically exciting, but if you're in it for the floral action, there's a nice 2-minute stroll through his garden halfway through. Granted, it's so overlit that half the flowers are as white as the cast, and there's an odd blurry effect on close-up shots that evokes the scene where James Bond has to vomit up poison in Casino Royale, but take what you can get.





I might as well also mention the score here, which is at its most twinkly and sickly in this scene. I think it's going for "swooning", but achieves only anodyne and simpering. The sonic equivalent of an antidepressant fog. I suppose I should just be happy there aren't any ukuleles.


Vernon.



Alfred's maltreated cook who befriends Bella and quits his job to help bring her out of her shell on a full-time basis.

The day they meet, she helps him clean up a pile of dirt. The next morning, he knocks on Bella's door with his two daughters, waking her up, and makes her breakfast, as a way of saying thank you, for the dirt. She tries to gently dissuade him – "that's very thoughtful of you, Vernon, but there's really no need", "I really need to get ready for work", that kind of thing – and he carries on regardless. She excuses herself to politely hyperventilate in her bathroom while he makes a mess in the kitchen, which I think we're supposed to see as her character flaw. You're so tightly wound, Bella! Loosen up! It's just Moriary from Sherlock barging into your house first thing in the morning to fuck up your house with his ugly children! This is a nice thing to happen!

Later that day, he asks her to "stand up" and "stay still, I don't want to hurt you", then hugs her. This is supposed to be a sweet moment and not a bit creepy and presumptious. "When was the last time you were hugged?", he asks. "It's been a while." "Yeah", he negs.

There's a bit in the middle where Bella falls asleep while eating a biscuit, and Vernon drapes a blanket over her, but not before taking the half-eaten biscuit from her hand and finishing it. This is probably supposed to be a cute and innocuous detail, even though he's clearly doing it to fuel his next wank.



He spends most of the running time milling about her house, prevented by his debilitating hayfever from helping Bella and Alfred with the gardening, except for a bit at the end when the hayfever becomes inconvenient to the plot, by which time they've correctly assumed nobody is invested enough to care.


Billy.





Shut the fuck up.

A clumsy, posh, handsome glasses wearer, recurring library visitor, and Bella's love interest. He is frequently reprimanded by her mean librarian boss for talking too loudly, apologising too loudly for talking too loudly, and sneaking snacks into the library and eating them too loudly.

Bella is immediately charmed by this loud rude messy cunt. I think we're supposed to be charmed by him. I think we're supposed to dislike the mean librarian, who also sometimes asks Bella to stop being consistently late to work. Oooh! She's so mean! Look at her mean face!



Billy is an inventor, and as he's getting to know Bella, he offers to show her his "mechanical bird thing".

















Inexplicably, he's not a rapist.

I'm not sure this is even supposed to be a deliberate misdirection. This absolutely strikes me as a film that wouldn't see any inherent darkness in a man pressuring a mentally ill woman into seeing his secret "bird thing" in a big secluded shed. He's wearing cute nerd glasses, how could he be a sex offender? This is no time for social anxiety, Bella!

He leads her into a warehouse he inherited from his parents, because of course he's a rich fuck, and fortunately, it's not a pervert's torture garage, but a fun harmless invention palace. We know this because there are cuckoo clock sound effects playing in the background.



Good work from the sound editor, or whoever was tasked to find an ambience that evokes something other than a giant terrifying rape hangar.

After he shows her this radio-controlled tortoise that looks like Robot Wars fodder they'd wheel out to get fucked up by Hypno-Disc in round 1...



...he unveils Luna, a mechanical bird puppet.



(I think we're supposed to not notice it's a puppet and believe it can actually fly, but any amount of budget spent on this film is already too much.)

He asks Bella – who, you remember, wants to write children's books, but was lacking in inspiration – to tell him a story about Luna. Inevitably, this sets her off recounting a distressingly obvious analogy for herself for the rest of the film. "Luna lost her parents at a very early age, and once she left the nest, she kept herself to herself, but then her landlord made her do up the garden, and then she followed some creepy prick into his dingy fuck dungeon..."

She continues it later, when she lets Billy in the library at night after they've closed. Storytelling while pacing back and forth across a table, she incorporates an anecdote we just saw Alfred tell her about a time he went up a mountain in Tehran to get a rare flower (he fucking loves flowers, Iranian or not, he can't get enough of the fuckers). Unfortunately, the next morning, her mean librarian boss gets wind of her letting an intruder in, and fires her.





In this sentence, "obstacles" is a euphemism for "getting justifiably sacked for sneaking a bumbling rapist into the workplace after hours and tramping all over the tables while plagiarising a story a dying neighbour told me in confidence", and "quest" is a euphemism for "still trying to fuck him".

One thing the film almost gets right is apparently outing Billy as a cunt cad – he doesn't turn up to a date with Bella, and is then seen holding hands with another woman. The resolution to this is, at the end, he turns up on crutches and says "ahh, actually, I got hit by a bus and I've got a twin". And that's that resolved. The only reason it was in there was to contrive a bit of 3rd act drama for characters who haven't faced nearly as much adversity as they've deserved.

I can't complain about most of the acting – they're trying their best, under the circumstances – but I'm really not sure what Jeremy Irvine was going for. It's either a bad performance of a lovely charming delicate man, or a good performance of a slimy insincere whingey-voiced creep. Ambiguity about this might be intentional, to make us buy into the apparent betrayal, but for there to be any ambiguity, I think we'd have to at least sometimes like him.

Final shot of the film: the mean librarian winces ruefully as she reads Bella Brown's published book. Owned, bitch! That'll teach you not to stand in the way of your incompetent staff's boring dreams!







Fuck off.

[machotrouts]

I'm sorry, this started as a reply in "What Non-New Films Have You Seen? (2018 Edition)", but got too big for page 49 of a behemoth list thread I have never deliberately clicked on

[BlodwynPig]

BBC. enough said.

[Captain Z]

I am certain I had a lot more fun reading this than ever watching the film.

Robot grief bird!

[PlanktonSideburns]

Lovely review, thanks for that

[greenman]

Along with Amélie doesn't seem like a coincidence this came out a couple of years after The Duke of Burgundy

[Emma Raducanu]

Great review. Can we have another?

[jobotic]

When I saw that repulsive title and the ace author of the post I know this would be good, but this wonderful.

Guarantee these cunts have been nowhere near a public library.

[saltysnacks]

This is the kind of film I could imagine enjoying after 2 bottles of wine. It does look disgustingly twee though.

[Spoon of Ploff]

Almost makes me want to watch the thing, but I'm not falling for that trick again.

[olliebean]

Was it kindness or just procrastination that caused you to post your review a day too late to see the film on iPlayer?

[Thomas]

Lovely review, trouts. Laughed Brian Blessedly at this -

I'd question how anyone could be truly motivated by a burning creative desire when they've got absolutely nothing to say, but then this film exists.

Tell you what, though; Amélie is still fucking good.

[Gregory Torso]

I would love to watch Amelie again, but I'm afraid. I'm just too afraid.

[machotrouts]

Thank you, people who complimented me for hating a film they have never watched. Just please bear in mind that this kind of thinking is how charismatic racists get elected

Was it kindness or just procrastination that caused you to post your review a day too late to see the film on iPlayer?

I had nearly finished writing up that post a few days before it fell off iPlayer, then Chrome lost all of my 547 tabs and I had to start it all over again. And I couldn't remember what I'd said so I had to rewatch the fucking film! No wonder I resent it. If you're still thinking about the part where I said I had 547 tabs open as if that was just a normal incidental detail just pretend I didn't mention it please that's for a different thread.

[jobotic]

Thank you, people who complimented me for hating a film they have never watched. Just please bear in mind that this kind of thinking is how charismatic racists get elected

Ha ha. I'd vote for you. What will you do about the Sikhs?

[Clownbaby]

Thanks for summary will not watch because of the fucking title alone