There are few places whose very names, through some sort of cultural consensus, conjure images of counterculture. Soho is one of those places, a setting so attuned to the middle-finger-to-authority pulse of underground London that even people who have never been there have a sense of what it must be like. Postcards from London uses the undeniable cachet of Soho as the foundation of its narrative and vibe. But rather than craft a worthwhile cinematic piece from this surest of building blocks, the film is an unfocused, self-indulgent and nostalgia-laden mess of a character study.
Postcards from London tells the story of Jim (Harris Dickinson), a sexually-fluid, starry-eyed country bumpkin from Essex who has come to “the streets of London” (one of the film’s more annoying refrains) in search of fame and fortune. He is beautiful and quickly finds an array of strange jobs. Even in the premise, the film is muddled. The film takes place in the twenty-first century, the characters toting their smart phones from scene to scene. Yet, both Jim and the Soho he finds himself in are from a different time. Even the very idea of living on “the streets of London” as some sort of bohemian wanderer is nonsense.
Upon arriving in London, Jim is, to be frank, an idiot who knows nothing about anything. He supposedly grew up in Essex in the 2010s. Essex is an hour by train from London and Jim has a smart phone; he would surely not be a witless dolt. Were the film set in the ‘60s, sure, it could be believable. There is a way to create such a character. In her similar and vastly superior film Electrick Children, for example, Rebecca Thomas has her protagonist be a girl running away from a fanatical cult. If Jim really is this clueless, then he is so empty-headed as to not be worthy of our attention.
Compounding the nonsensical backstory of Jim is Soho as presented in Postcards from London. It is full of the sort of bohemians one would expect from the ‘60s, but also folks who probably haunted the area in the ‘30s. The neon signs and red light-district-feel went out when Thatcher was in charge in the ‘80s. Furthering the sense of confusion, the film is broken into chapters introduced on title cards with a font straight out of The Clash (one chapter is even titled “London Calling”). Sure, the film is stylized and the Soho it presents is supposed to be imaginary, but creative license has its limits: the Soho in the film does need to feel like a place that could actually exist and it does not. It seems writer-director Steve McLean loves the two iconic memoirs on Soho—Daniel Farson’s Soho in the Fifties and Christopher Howse’s Soho in the Eighties—and wishes that that version of the neighborhood still existed. But here’s the thing about films: if a director wants his film set in the ‘80s, he can do that! This is England, for example, did so to great effect. Instead, McLean sets his film in a timeless limbo that is so full of obvious cultural signifiers from various periods that viewers are going to roll their eyes at his easy references even while getting whiplash from being jerked from decade to decade in each subsequent scene.
There is more about Postcards from London than just the protagonist and setting that are groan-inducing. There is an unexplained obsession with Caravaggio—the sixteenth-century Italian painter—that even influences the visual styling of the film. Art is a central focus in the film, but rarely does it venture beyond Caravaggio. Why Caravaggio? No one ever answers. There is a doctor/prostitute character in a straight-from-a-porno “sexy nurse” costume, which, in a made-up sort-of London where the director can come up with anything he wants (apparently), begs the question of why a sexy nurse costume, of all things? One of the pivotal bit characters in Postcards from London is an exemplar of the “magical negro” trope; McLean even has the temerity to make him a homeless shyster/repressed sculptor.
None of this comes across as offensive. Not because sexy nurse outfits and the continued deployment of racial stereotypes are not offensive—they are—but because McLean seems to be as clued in to the zeitgeist as Jim is. What makes these sorts of nostalgia-overburdened films about bygone cultural moments work is a true lover of the period and place in the creative lead, someone who unearths for the viewer some hidden gem forgotten by history. The film tries to do this: to sound smart by having characters discuss cultural things, to wow the viewer with the level of knowledge brought to the fore. But McLean offers Caravaggio and The Clash. Even “The Gilmore Girls” and “White Collar,” mid-budget (or less) pre-Golden Age TV shows, pull this off with more aplomb! This is a puerile, indulgent film about a credulity-straining dolt chock full of banal references and a nonsense setting.
The post Postcards from London appeared first on Spectrum Culture.