Wonderland

This is a very artful piece of work which looks like it was made by the Dogma mob – hand –held camera, minimal lighting, grainy film, but it is actually very well put together by Michael Winterbottom with superior acting, good musical score (by Michael Nyman) and a reasonable amount of dramatic tension. Initially I thought `God this is boring' as three days in the life of three sisters and their family, lovers and friends, all ordinary Londoners, unfolded, but by about a third of the way through it got interesting. By the end I was starting even to care about the characters. It was a little like watching a television series where the fairly ordinary characters unfold slowly, but somehow over time get a hold on your imagination. Except of course this film is just over 100 minutes long.

We see most of the story through Nadia, the middle sister, played by Gina McKee, who last popped up at a dinner party in `Notting Hill'. This time it's inner South London, and Nadia is answering lonely hearts ads without great success. Her older sister Debbie (Shirley Henderson, the tiny diva from `Topsy Turvy') who has an ex husband and a 10 year old son, seems to have no trouble picking up men, while Mollie (Mollie Parker) the youngest, is awaiting the birth of her first child. In a whirl of lights, crowded streets, traffic, noisy bars, cigarette smoke and small ill-lit rooms, their interwoven stories are played out. In the background, but close at hand are Mum and Dad, despising each other but still living in the same house.

All the sisters are well portrayed but Kika Markham and Jack Shepard, trusty old troupers that they are, practically steal the show as the disillusioned parents. The sister's men (and their mostly absent brother) are portrayed as weak, shallow or stupid, but the sisters are a forgiving bunch (unlike their mother).

It really is quite an achievement to make an interesting, honest movie about lives so mundane that they make `This Life' look like `Melrose Place'. If I were such an ordinary Londoner and I saw this film I think I'd experience the shock of recognition. And then consider emigrating. The life of the contemporary ordinary female Londoner is not far removed from quiet desperation, it seems. And perhaps that's so for the men too. It's just that they notice it a bit less.

This may be the best film of 2000 (at least that's when it was released in Australia).

Whilst film-makers like P.T. Anderson have made admirable attempts at personal drama in the last few years, and Mike Leigh continues to tell us that no-one suffers like the poor (as if we didn't know that), Michael Winterbottom has re-defined the genres. This is English kitchen sink drama without the tired clichés of class wars, which have seemed a bit anachronistic since the fall of the Tories.

Shot in a stunning cinemascope (1:2.35) and available light, with the tiniest of crews, this is London as you've only seen it if you've seen it for yourself.

The cast shines. I defy anyone to make it through this film without falling in love with Gina McKee. That's not to say that Shirley Henderson and Molly Parker are anything less than charming. Ian Hart and Stuart Townsend are wonderful. Keep an eye out for the beautifully natural performance of David Fahm as Franklyn. Jack Shepherd, Kika Markham and John Simm round out the main cast with equally powerful performances.

A great script from first time screen-writer Lawrence Coriat. Michael Nyman turns out his most subtle and restrained music score yet. Michael Winterbottom is turning out to be the Stanley Kubrick of the 21st century. Who else has been able to jump from one genre to another with such ease and grace?

This is a compelling film, well worth having your own copy of.

I caught this on TV without knowing who it was by and I was instantly captivated. The first thing is that it's filmed and set where I live, around the Elephant and Castle, as well as in Soho, and it's about the people I see every day. It's absolutely spot on about the kind of lives people around here lead and the way individuals and different social groups interact.

What lifts it above the sort of social realism common in British cinema is the cutting, the cinematography and Michael Nyman's lovely music, which must be his best work post-Greenaway. While I've never been a big fan of the 'poetry of degradation' school of art, somehow the ugliness and squalor of South East London are transformed by this film and the lives of the characters are invested with real dignity.

Though it may deal with the same sort of subject matter as Ken Loach or Mike Leigh, the style and approach are very different - the difference between a great piece of prose and a poem. I guess you could say Winterbottom and Nyman do for London what Scorsese and Herrmann did for New York in Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.

This is a beautiful film and I feel real gratitude to Michael Winterbottom for bringing our lives to the screen in such a way.

The city of London has featured in innumerable films - a vast, intensely varied metropolis, it has served as a vivid backdrop countless times. From the sun-drenched banks of the Thames in 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' to the gloomy squalor of Camden Town in 'Withnail & I' it is always an interesting setting for a story. But in 'Wonderland', directed by Michael Winterbottom ('Jude', 'Welcome to Sarajevo'), it almost gains a life of its own.

Superficially a story of the day-to-day lives of three sisters, Wonderland is more about the city and the millions of people who live in it than the troubled family the plot centres on. They are Nadia (Gina McKee), a single woman desperately in search of friendship and romance, Debbie (Shirley Henderson), a single mother with a young son (Peter Marfleet) and Molly (Molly Parker), a pregnant woman whose husband (John Simm) is having doubts.

The camera follows them (mostly Nadia) as they travel through the busy streets of the capital. It does not concentrate on just the characters, often lingering on faces and groups, giving the film a real-life edge. This is added to by the hand-held camera work and the slightly grainy quality of the image, which is as though a much larger picture has been magnified to concentrate on these people.

The stories themselves are uniformly (and depressingly) realistic, although they all end on a high note, leaving the viewer surprisingly upbeat. Winterbottom has a knack of coaxing great performances from good actors and does not fail here, with the quietly miserable couple of Kika Markham and Jack Shepherd as the sisters' parents standing out.

Wonderland will never break any box office records and is certainly not flawless, but it is an admirable film and it warms the cockles of this reviewer to see such worthy films still being made in Britain.

Although not classified as a film for TV, `Wonderland' is very much in the style of a production for that media, and indeed might even be classified as `soap-opera'.

But forget anything and everything you have seen of that type of film: `Wonderland' is totally in another sphere, with a well-constructed story of a long-weekend, magnificently natural performances and excellent dialogues. One constantly thinks of the theatre playhouse element as the actors carry forward this sociological document, excellently choreographed by Michael Nyman´s music.

Here indeed is a richly rewarding 100-odd minutes of your time. The characters are immediate and thus so real that you cannot but fail to be swept into the story. Intertwining levels from the elderly couple, down through their daughters to the young grandson, all lends palpable reality to the price of living in the backdrops of a teeming faceless city.

Set over the weekend on which the ever faithful and conservative British continue celebrating `Guy Fawkes Night' commemorating the attempted blowing up of the Houses of Parliament by said Guido Fawkes a few centuries ago, the film cleverly brings together ordinary Londoners at a particular moment which undoubtedly is crucial to each of them. The cast is splendid; the performances are exactly right, natural, and thus so realistic; there is no forced over-the-top stuff here. Whereas I can easily sympathise with the symptomatic causes underlying the nonentity of suburban life in gigantic cities, and therefore can easily feel for these people in Winterbottom's very welcome offering in this film, I can so easily again see why, when barely twenty, I took to my heels and left London for other pastures.

Thanks for reminding me, Mr. Winterbottom. But thanks also for a fascinating insight into fine character-making in a very enjoyable film.