Clapham Junction

This film is about the events that happen to several gay men around Clapham Common in 36 hours.

Due to the enormous number of characters involved, the beginning of the film is a little slow. Once the scene is set, a lot of action kicks in. It touches upon a lot of aspects of gay culture, some of the unpleasant aspects are portrayed in a raw and almost disturbing manner. As others have commented, the scene where the 14 year old boy and the loner encounter at home is dramatic, tense and well acted. It is easily the most memorable scene of the whole film.

This film is raw, brutal and depressing. It can certainly help to raise debates over anonymous sex, and raise awareness over the tragedy of gay bashing.

This movie gets another mixed review from me.

I didn't mind the negative portrayals so much (unsympathetic people exist, after all, among straights and gays alike, as does hatred and hypocrisy, and the performances were mostly really good), but I didn't like that that's all we get in this film. I've read that the writer didn't intend to portray the full range of gay life, but I guess that was what I expected from an anniversary-type movie. All the depression, the violence, the negativity left me feeling rather bleak and unsatisfied, thinking "But that's not all there is!"

And, on a rather superficial note, as a big fan of 'Maurice' I did wish for more interaction between Wilby and Graves. :)

Comparing it to the other European heterosexual crap we get to see on TV, I would rate this gay one into the top league of good movies. As a gay man, I wonder why I like it. The message of this movie is that gays have ONLY bitchy sex, on public toilets and all of that in a violent way. To put this straight, gay life isn't that way! I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories but somehow, I hear all my alarm bells ringing. To make it short, the movie is good for people who are gay or who have at least experience with it. To all the newbies to that subject it's an anti gay movie. Please remember this story is fiction. 'Not a documentary!

I was disappointed. The final image did it for me. That is, it clinched my feeling about the film and it's ambitions. That final image is so pat, so cliched. Almost all of the gay characters are rather pitiful. Is that the point of the film?

The problem with Kevin Elyot's (writer) and Adrian Shergold's (director) boldly ambitious "Clapham Junction" is that it attempts to bite off so much more than it can possibly chew in just under two hours. Elyot goes for an epic structure in an intimate setting. At times it looks like he's trying to cram in forty years of gay sexual history into a night and day and it just doesn't work. I wish I could have liked it more because there is so much here to admire and spread over, maybe six weekly episodes, he might have got away with it but as it stands it just doesn't ring true. This may well be down to Elyot's reliance on coincidence. All the characters seem to be inter-related. Nothing wrong with that, you might say; it has worked as a backdrop to many splendid dramas in the past but you have to suspend quite a lot of disbelief when in a city the size of London with a sizeable gay population, all the gay characters keep bumping into each other in clubs, public toilets, on Clapham Common itself or at dinner parties or just in living across the street from each other. It's a banal plot device and you can't help feeling Elyot would have made his point a lot better if the stories hadn't been connected.

Nor is Elyot particularly good at serving up dialogue that sounds believable or naturalistic. The characters either talk in sound-bites or are reduced to double-entendres. If he can get in a crass joke, he does and nobody comes out of it well. But at least he tries. There is hardly an aspect of gay life, (or of 'straight' society's reaction to it), that he leaves unexplored. He even gives us the self-loathing bit of gay trade who beats up his pick-up for the night, (and later gets beaten up himself), and the film's most successful story is the one between the pedophile and the fourteen year old boy who worships him, (this only let down by casting a twenty-three year old actor as the boy).

It is also very unevenly acted. There may be an in-joke of sorts in casting James Wilby and Rupert Graves, (the lovers from "Maurice"), Wilby as a closeted married man and Graves as an out and aging queen he eyes up in a toilet and later meets at a dinner party. Perhaps if these parts had been better written neither actor would have looked so foolish. The best performances come from Jospeh Mawle and Luke Tredaway as the pedophile and the boy and it's very much to their credit that they lift a very difficult subject and make it moving and oddly romantic. Detractors will, of course, find this story the most objectionable for obvious reasons although the producers have cushioned the blow by casting the obviously older Tredaway as the boy.

The film itself takes as its basis the real-life murder of Jody Dobrowski on Clapham Common in 2005 but the impact is weakened by the episodic structure. Ultimately "Clapham Junction" is neither fish nor fowl but an unwieldy hybrid. Its heart may be in the right place but you can't help but feel it does its subject, (whatever you take its subject to be), something of an injustice.