Old Boys | Little White Lies

Old Boys

22 Feb 2019 / Released: 22 Feb 2019

Group of young adults, mostly men, standing in a field with trees and a lake visible in the background. All are wearing white tops and dark bottoms.
Group of young adults, mostly men, standing in a field with trees and a lake visible in the background. All are wearing white tops and dark bottoms.
3

Anticipation.

Fumbling teenage romance starring up-and-comer Alex Lawther – could be interesting?

2

Enjoyment.

Predictable storyline which offers little to laugh about.

2

In Retrospect.

This public school take on a conventional coming-of-age story lacks a distinct bite.

Teen love match­ing at a fusty pub­lic school is the back­drop to this inter­mit­tent­ly suc­cess­ful roman­tic comedy.

Here’s one we’ve heard before: geek sets out to help jock gain girl, but secret­ly hopes she will end up favour­ing intel­li­gence over beau­ty. Any­one famil­iar with Cyra­no de Berg­er­ac’ will know the score. The set­ting of Toby MacDonald’s Old Boys is an Eng­lish pub­lic school some­time in the 1980s; our anti-hero is Amber­son (Alex Lawther), clas­sic asth­mat­ic and bespec­ta­cled underdog.

He imme­di­ate­ly falls for Agnes (Pauline Eti­enne), the new French teacher’s head­strong daugh­ter, while she con­fess­es to him her desire for Win­ches­ter (Jon­ah Hauer-King), the brawny, dim sports cap­tain. What ensues sees Amber­son gain the trust of bewil­dered Win­ches­ter in respond­ing to Agnes’s post­mod­ern-iron­ic video­taped mes­sages, and their unlike­ly friend­ship develops.

As Win­ches­ter realis­es he’s less seri­ous about romance than school sports, he asks Amber­son to record a break-up mes­sage, but Amber­son finds him­self too smit­ten to be able to aban­don the project – though will he reveal him­self to Agnes as her wit­ty correspondent?

There is noth­ing wrong with rehash­ing old teen nar­ra­tives, but the prob­lem with Old Boys is that it is nei­ther fun­ny nor inter­est­ing. The pub­lic school set­ting offers an oppor­tu­ni­ty for satire that is only part­ly seized upon, as the por­tray­al of this pecu­liar envi­ron­ment seems more nos­tal­gic than scathing. It is impres­sive how eas­i­ly it stands in for the 1930s until Agnes shows up in her blue jeans, but the idea that this micro­cosm is stuck in its own time warp is not that nov­el. At this point in time, it is frankly more fright­en­ing than funny.

Agnes’s rela­tion­ship to her cre­ative­ly chal­lenged author father, who holds her back from pur­su­ing her own dreams in Berlin, comes across as a more worth­while sto­ry to tell – and there is both depth and humour in these moments between Eti­enne and Denis Méno­chet, who plays her father.

Lawther’s Amber­son is endear­ing­ly dumpy, maybe too much so. While bob­bing along with his adven­tures is fine, there is nev­er real­ly a sense that the stakes are par­tic­u­lar­ly high or that he won’t end up alright in the end. Of course he will. How he attains that hap­pi­ness is, sad­ly, not very enthralling.

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