Touches You

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

One of the rare movies / series in which the romantic aspects of the novel get a perhaps superlative treatment as they deserve. Allan Hollinghurst's novel has a special significance to me, but that is beside the point here. The film has a special appeal, a nostalgia, a remembrance of things past to which the music deserves particular praise. There is no other film that I can remember that moves me to such a degree. Yes, I was there, in the London of those years. Yes, I was lonely and yearning for some human touch. Yes, it all comes back. It's hard to describe, for those of you who did not live those times. This is a true gem to be treasured and revisited whenever your daily life seems unbearable. Dan Stevens is the innocent hero of his life. He may have become a better known actor later on, but this is his defining moment and film.

Lovely young Nick Guest (Dan Stevens) from a middle-class home falls into (unrequited) love with his college mate Toby Fedden (Oliver Coleman), comes to live with Toby's wealthy family in their splendid house in Notting Hill and falls in love with them too – "Brideshead Revisited" in London, in fact. Toby's father Gerald (Tim McInnerney) is a Tory MP and craven admirer of "the Lady", Margaret Thatcher, who is in the ascendant, post Falklands, while his mother Rachel (Alice Krige) is from a wealthy Jewish banking family.The action, which unfolds in three Acts, is nicely boxed between Thatcher's two re-elections in 1983 and 1987. Nick discovers that the glittering Feddens, including Toby's sister Cat (Hayley Atwell), are not as noble as they seem, and when he becomes an embarrassment to them he is discarded.The film sticks fairly close to Alan Hollinghurst's novel and retains its Gay sensibility – we see things from Nick's point of view. Somehow the Nick of the film is a more sympathetic character than the Nick of the book – possibly because of Dan Steven's cool performance. Hollinghurst wanted to remind us of what it was like to be Gay in Britain in the 1980s – legalized but subject to widespread homophobia and threatened by the march of AIDS, then a death sentence. The film picks this up very graphically with perhaps greater impact than the book. The wealthy "new money" Thatcherites are given a going over as well (the Lady herself puts in a cameo appearance at the end of Act 2). With supporters like those the Thatcher revolution was always going to be bloody.Nick himself is more interested in art than politics; his "line of beauty" is a curved line (the "Ogee") drawn by Hogarth which happens to coincide with the line of the male buttocks. His relationship with the Feddens is aspirational rather than mercenary (his lover Wani (Alex Wyndham) provides the cash for their "Ogee" magazine). In the end, one can imagine him, like his father, an antique dealer, smacked down by the upper class he sought to join. (Funnily enough, antique dealing in Britain is full of Public School types – "Lovejoy" is a bit of an aberration.) Andrew Davies has produced a typically seamless adaptation, and virtually all the performances are faultless. Some of the minor roles are the most vividly executed, such as Christopher Fairbanks' Barry Groom, homophobia personified, and Barbara Flynn's common as muck Lady Tipper. The class system in Britain was certainly robust enough to survive Mrs Thatcher – she just created a new class of wealthy philistines.

I decided to watch this serial after seeing the endless adverts for it on the BBC in the weeks prior to it starting. I watched it despite the fact that I don't like the pretentious kind of stuff that Alan Hollinghurst writes (sorry to his fans but I think we have a case of the emperor's new clothes with this author's work). I admit that the acting is excellent, it is beautifully shot and I was reasonably entertained by it - however- I found that the storyline was extremely thin and after watching all three episodes feel very unsatisfied with this rather empty production. The 'explicit' gay sex that the media droned on about has all been done before on TV - several times - so it was nothing very shocking I'm afraid. Full marks for production values but low ones for storyline/content I'm afraid.

I watched the first episode of the line of beauty last Wednesday (17th May) and I personally enjoyed it. I, myself am only 22 years old and so I was born in the eighties but obviously don't remember it. The story follows one man through his sexual awakening in amidst all the fake glamour of the 80's Tory government. The political side of it is interesting to watch, but the main focus was watching Dan Stevens character (Nick Guest) meeting other men. I have not seen Dan Stevens before in anything else, but from now on I will be on the look out for anything else he appears in. His crystal clear blue eyes, and the way he plays the character's naiveté (in the first episode anyway) is well done. I will definitely watch the next two episodes and may even read the book if I can get hold of it. I recommend tuning in, (espically if your gay) for the sex scenes alone but also for the clever portrayal of the Thatcherite years and how it both destroyed and made the country we are all living in today.