Encontros e Desencontros

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.

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.

"Wonderland" is a well-articulated drama about working people in London going through the emotional chaos of everyday life. What makes it special is that it shows a family with little or no parental support struggling to hold together by the fortitude of its siblings. It is a special film in two other ways: characters act out their roles within unstaged, real world settings and, at the same time, the characters are shown, mostly in isolation, responding to these same settings. By doing so, the film highlights even more the chaotic, transitory, and even aimless behaviors of urban life. We see the mother, Eileen (Kika Markham) relieving her frustrations by playing in an actual bingo hall, the estranged father, Tim (Stuart Townsend) taking his son Jack (Peter Marfleet) to a wildly contested soccer match, an emotionally wounded woman, Nadia (Gina McKee) riding a double-decker bus filled with revelers, and the piece-de-resistance of one of the pregnant characters, Molly (Molly Parker) giving live birth. The film even uses fast forwarding frames in two scenes, one involving Nadia and her lonely-hearts club failures and the other when the dishonest husband James cannot return home to his wife, to illustrate their out of control, misdirected lives. Another treat of this film is that we don't initially know the identity of the characters and their connection to each other until the film slowly unfolds bits and pieces of their story. While that might tax the patience of some people, I became much more alert to the story. What was annoying was the overemphasis on the background nightlife of London and the heavy dramatic score, a score that seemed to tip off in at least two places that the film was prematurely ending. Overall, "Wonderland" is a well-acted, worthwhile film because it successfully portrays real-life situations involving real-life struggles in a unusually candid and poignant way.

This movie has only just come out on DVD in Britain, that is a shamefully long time for a film to reach the country it was made in. But now it is here, and possibly finding a new audience, I thought I'd write a quick review. If you have read some of the other reviews, you will no doubt be aware of the 'kitchen sink' factor in this film. Well, I'm not going to deny that, the subject matter would not look out of place in a soap opera. . . .however it is the performances, the script and the fantastic style of this movie which pulls it out of the mundane and into the cinematic. Michael Winterbottom is clearly a director who like several of his British contemporaries such as Mike Leigh and Shane Meadows, believes that the drama around us in everyday life is worthy of the big screen. The film has a fine ensemble of characters, three very different sisters, their estranged brother and squabbling parents. The performances are brave and heartfelt in all cases, and even though the drama takes place over one weekend, the characters really do evolve. The most enticing thing about the film is the way it is shot and scored. Sean Bobbitt's time lapse photography and dogma style 16mm cinematography combined with Michael Nyman's emotive music is a really fantastic combination. This film shows London how the people who live there see it, namely from the ground. Nearly every film set in London now seems to have to include the Gherkin, the Tate modern and the Millennium wheel, what Winterbottom presents us with is something simultaneously far less and far more remarkable.

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.