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.
Published 22 Feb 2019
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