We'll Take Manhattan

Not bothered about other reviews being on the negative side, I thoroughly enjoyed We'll Take Manhattan. I originally saw it in 2012, and have recently downloaded it from itunes and watched it twice. I thought Aneurin Barnard was cheeky and irreverant as David Bailey, Karen Gillan was funny and lovable as Jean Shrimpton and Helen McCrory was a scream as Lady Clare Rendlesham. I particularly enjoyed the clashes between Bailey and Rendlesham in New York. Karen Gillan wasn't a perfect Jean Shrimpton lookalike, but it would have been hard to find someone with her unique looks.

Look, on the positive side, Karen Gillan looks every bit as lovely as you'd expect in every shot. But that's not enough to sustain a movie as light as this!

The basic problem is we all know the story -- young turks storm in, tell those fuddy duddy oldies there's a new sheriff in town, fuddy duddy oldies get their come-uppance as they learn how fantasic the youngsters are at their chosen art. It's Mary Sue fan fiction on the big screen.

And the story doesn't become more interesting by claiming it (more or less...) represents some events that really happened fifty years ago.

A much more interesting story, for example, would have been one focussing on Lady Clare and the top editors at Vogue, with Bailey and Shrimpton as bit characters. Presumably they had been doing things a certain way throughout the late 40s and the fifties; presumably they had reason to believe things were changing in the world of fashion; but what were the conversations around this? A mercenary acceptance that a tidal wave of young money might as well be milked? An understanding that fashion runs in cycles, and the cycle of the next twenty years was going to be rebel without a clue? Terror that they'd never understood what they were doing, but they seemed to have a feel for what people wanted -- except now they no longer had that feel?

A film of a bunch of people sitting around a table, done well, can be riveting -- cf Conspiracy. A movie like that, with the head staff of British Vogue in 1961 puzzling out the situation in which they found themselves, and asking where the world was headed, and why it had changed, from the vantage of fashion -- now that's a movie that has serious potential for being compelling and original!

It was the early 1960s and British fashion photography was somewhat stuck in a rut. Models all did a version of the same poses and photographers used medium format, i.e. 2 1/4" square, cameras. Then along came the new kid with a vastly different style and a Pentax 35mm camera.

Along with him came a very young girl from an agrarian family, pretty and tall but with no experience. Her name is Jean Shrimpton and she is played here by Karen Gillan. While Gillan doesn't that much look like a young Shrimpton she is lovely in her own right and a fine actress.

There is an assignment to be shot in Manhattan. The young photographer is brash and difficult but has a vision he won't abandon even with the prospect of being fired. His vision works and changes the fashion approach thereafter. Shrimpto became a supermodel.

I really enjoyed this, I will watch it again. I was already a big Karen Gillan fan, she can play almost anything. On Amazon Sreaming movies.

This dramatisation of the epochal David Bailey / Jean Shrimpton photo-shoot in New York, January 1962 made for an entertaining if occasionally shallow viewing. Presented very much as a confrontation between rebellious youth and fusty conservatism (in the person of their accompanying chaperon, the tyrannical, but brittle and of course much older Lady Rendlesham), Bailey and Shrimpton are portrayed as the advance guard of the whole Swinging 60's movement, a point rather unsubtly made with its references to the Beatles and Mary Quant just before the end.

Whether Bailey's contribution to photography was quite as seismic as the Beatles on music or Quant on fashion is open to debate but as a light, amusing and easy on the eye entertainment, it worked well I thought. Bailey's famous pictures are well recreated, much to the righteous indignation of behind-the-times Rendlesham, and while there's not much more to the piece than their various contretemps, interspersed with Shrimpton's occasional vulnerability, precocity and gaucheness, one has to respect the difficulty in making the fashion world a gripping dramatic undertaking.

The acting of the three leads was very good, Aneurin Bernard especially good as the saturnine, Cockney-on-the-make, "don't call me David" Bailey, Helen McCrory equally so as the ever-so posh Lady Rendlesham and if Karen Gillan sometimes seems too old for the 18 that the real Shrimpton was at the time, she comes through in the end as her character develops some maturity and wisdom. I don't have much of an opinion of the fashion world but saw from this how the whole "supermodel" phenomenon of recent times got its start. Whether that was something I desperately needed to know, I'm not sure but the production did satisfy my curiosity in British popular culture in the 60's and was also one of the rare programmes my wife and I could sit and watch together with equal interest and yes, enjoyment

I've been drawn back to watch this film several times. It is a very well crafted film with excellent performances. The pace can be slow at times, but with the excellent sound track this simply adds to the atmosphere. Perhaps it's too "arty" to be main stream, which might explain many of the negative reviews from people who presumably enjoy Pirates of the Caribbean.