Gregory's Girl

Back in the eighties when my family first purchased a (Betamax!) video recorder, I watched this all the time. There's just something about the combination of youngster actors who obviously hadn't come from the usual stage schools, the lines from minor characters that you almost miss the first few times (the school reporter - 'I want to interview you and that girl in 4A who had the triplets' - and so many more!) and just the general surrealism (the penguin wandering around the school must surely have influenced the writers of 'Teachers'?) There's a wealth of bizarre characters, both pupils and staff, and for someone who was 13 when it came out, it will never fail to take me back to those awkward teenage crushes and raise a smile. Well, several smiles actually.

This is one of the funniest and most warm-hearted films ever! John Gordon Sinclair and Dee Hepburn were absolutely wonderful in this story of teenage love and the sudden twists & turns that occur when you think you've met THE ONE, but then someone else...

There is only one thing negative I could say about Gregory's Girl...it makes you sad that the innocence of first love and first dates is gone forever, and also makes me wish my school had been as cool as Gregory's. Excellent performances by all and sundry, no attempts to sacrifice realism for laughs and Clare Grogan at her prettiest. Special mention must be given to the music, wonderfully twee and with a kind of nostalgic delight. Only Bill Forsyth seems able to avoid mawkishness yet still make utterly inoffensive and delectable movies. One of my top ten favourite films and one I never stop enjoying.

Watching 'Gregory's Girl' for the first time in over two decades, one is immediately struck by reminders of when it was made: the grainy film, the dreadful soundtrack, the big hair of both its male and female characters. But one is soon also reminded of why it proved such a massive hit, in spite of it's low budget, unpretentious nature. For at its heart, Bill Forsyth's film captures two eternal realities, the (potentially charming) essential uselessness of a certain sort of teenage male, and the particular uselessness of just about all males when confronted by a sufficiently pretty girl (Dee Hepburn, although Clare Grogan, later a pop star, appears in a secondary role). But the gentle narrative eschews the obvious cliché, and it's also nice to see a story set in a Scottish housing scheme that isn't just a tale of drugs and A.I.D.S. It still feels funny and true after almost thirty years.

Excellent stuff from Bill Forsyth. Admittedly, the plot is strangely lop-sided, with the last 15 minutes proving quite detatched from the rest of it, and a perhaps quite unpredictable ending.

But what is great about this film is its depiction of adolescent gangly awkwardness, mostly in the form of John Gordon Sinclair. He and the other characters come across very strongly, partly I am sure due to the almost jaw-droppingly plain and dull backdrop, in the form of Cumbernauld, filmed with great care. This, coupled with the rather odd electric jazz soundtrack, result in a strange sterility of surroundings otherwise only found in the likes of 2001 etc. The beauty of the hills and the sunsets are left to towards the end, which acts as a great contrast.

Certain comparisons might even be drawn with later films like The Rachel Papers and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (ie the role of Cameron), although don't expect either of those to prepare you for the dazzling Gregory!

Good to see Clare Grogan pre- pop stardom with Altered Images too...