Postcards from London | Little White Lies

Post­cards from London

23 Nov 2018 / Released: 23 Nov 2018

A man in a red jacket with a space emblem stands in a dimly lit room, his face thoughtful and pensive.
A man in a red jacket with a space emblem stands in a dimly lit room, his face thoughtful and pensive.
3

Anticipation.

This unique premise promises an offbeat look at the sensuality of art.

2

Enjoyment.

Some great visuals, but often feels like a directionless trudge.

3

In Retrospect.

It’s worth it for Harris Dickinson and you won’t have seen anything like it.

This high­ly stylised dra­ma fol­lows a male escort’s jour­ney through the neon-lit streets of Soho.

Eigh­teen-year-old Jim (Har­ris Dick­in­son) is look­ing for a place to stay. He’s left his fam­i­ly home in Essex to seek his for­tune on the neon-drenched streets of Soho and it’s not long before he realis­es that there’s a lot on offer in London’s after-dark wonderland.

Every­thing except a bed for the night, it seems. Enter the Sexy Boys Racon­teurs, a group of male escorts who take the attrac­tive young Jim under their wing. For this group of lads, the sex part of their job is a breeze; their main focus is the post-coital chat. In order to impress their client base of high-class old­er men, the group teach­es Jim all they know about clas­sic art. The only prob­lem is, Jim finds him­self over­whelmed with the beau­ty of a gen­uine work of art to the point where he falls unconscious.

Filmed entire­ly in a stu­dio, with wood­en sets and bright light­ing cre­at­ing the world for the char­ac­ters, direc­tor Steve McLean cre­ates a high­ly stylised film that feels removed from time and place. While there is pass­ing ref­er­ence to social media and the use of a mobile phone, Jim also takes calls on a rotary dial phone and places his escort ads in a red Lon­don phone box. McLean clear­ly wants to evoke the long-gone Soho of the 70s and 80s in a time­less space and yet we simul­ta­ne­ous­ly find our­selves in present day and, in Jim’s hal­lu­ci­na­tions, the Baroque era.

The film is per­haps bet­ter described as a the­atri­cal fever dream. It cer­tain­ly uses the­atri­cal con­ven­tions, with tableaux fre­quent­ly used to stop and cap­ture the spin­ning world of Soho and to bear wit­ness to Jim’s uncon­scious rever­ies in which he stars as the cen­tral fig­ure in a famous mas­ter­piece. The dia­logue, too, takes on a more the­atri­cal tone, often paced more like a song or beat poem than a real­is­tic conversation.

There’s no doubt that this film is a cel­e­bra­tion of Dickinson’s beau­ty. It’s impos­si­ble to deny his Ado­nis-like fea­tures and angel­ic face that ulti­mate­ly car­ry this cel­e­bra­tion of the male form. The prob­lem is that, for a film about sex and the erot­ic delights of clas­sic art, it’s just not a sexy film. Post­cards From Lon­don is devoid of the sen­su­al­i­ty that it speaks so enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly about.

The clunky script, in its attempt to cel­e­brate great art and rem­i­nisce about Soho’s hey­day, shoe­horns in repeat­ed ref­er­ences to Car­avag­gio, Fran­cis Bacon and Lucian Freud, but for all the film’s rep­e­ti­tion it’s still not clear what we’re sup­posed to make of these fig­ures, their work and their rel­e­vance to the sto­ry. It’s an unsub­tle and jar­ring homage that seems to be more impor­tant to McLean than an orig­i­nal nar­ra­tive. Despite such evoca­tive sub­ject mat­ter, the film ulti­mate­ly leaves us cold.

You might like