'Gregory's Two Girls' is the belated sequel to director Bill Forsyth's career making 1981 comedy 'Gregory's Girl', about an eccentric Scottish high school student named Gregory Underwood (John Gordon Sinclair), think of it as a kind of droll proto-'Napoleon Dynamite'. It's nearly twenty years later and Gregory is now a high school English teacher with decidedly left wing political sympathies. The beliefs he extolls in the classroom inspire two students to get involved in an amateurish case of vigilantism against a local computer manufacture, into which they drag Mr. Underwood.
Things get complicated on several fronts, the owner of the computer company is an old high school friend of Gregory's, turns out there are actual national security secrets related to the work the company is doing, a romantic relationship with the schools music teacher is on the verge of happing for Gregory, and he's been having wet dreams about one of the activist students he's now spending a lot of time alone with.
I had some real interest in seeing what Gregory would have gotten up to after many years, and John Gordon Sinclair has some genuinely funny comic moments throughout the film, but what a weird plot to put him into. This project must have sounded better on paper then it ended up being on the screen. At times this is a cringingly awkward comedy, uncomfortable. Though the scene in which Gregory is trying to explain why he was found alone in the park with a teenage girl, to her father, headmaster, and some police officers, is worthy of Rickie Gervais. The political stuff feels random.
Bill Forsyth the director is always interested in taking his stories down unusual paths, though maybe this one would have been better left untrod, though I do admire his guts. This turned out to be the last film he ever made. *1/2
No comments:
Post a Comment