Dir.
Gurinder Chadha, US, 2008, 100 mins,
Cast: Georgia Groome, Aaron Johnson, Alan Davies
Review by Carol Allen
While lacking the
unexpectedness of Chadha's "Bend
it Like Beckham" with its interesting and different
cultural conflict, this is a still a charming and entertaining
film, this time about the angst and intensity of burgeoning
adolescence. Despite its American finance and the fact that
Chadha takes some of her inspiration from the American high
school movie genre, this feels like a very British movie,
which is based on Leeds born writer Louise Rennison's novels.
Only Chadha would have the delightfully cheeky idea of setting
a story about young people discovering love and sex in the
south coast town of Eastbourne, often described as "God's
waiting room" because of the large number of elderly
people who live there, though some of the prettier bits were
actually shot in nearby Brighton. And the sight of all those
older people in the background nearing the end of their lives,
adds a certain poignancy to this tale of young people on
the brink of adulthood.
14 year old Georgia (Groome) has two
ambitions. To get herself a gorgeous sex god as a boyfriend
and to throw the best ever 15th birthday party in Eastbourne's
coolest club. Of course her embarrassing parents (Karen
Taylor and Davies), who date from the middle ages, otherwise
known as the seventies, don't understand her. Only her
beloved cat Angus and her best mates Jas (Eleanor Tomlinson),
Rosie (Georgia Henshaw) and Ellen (Manjeeven Grewal) do.
To explain the rest of the title, "thongs" are
the uncomfortable underwear that school sexpot Slaggy Lindsay
(Kimberley Nixon), the Eastbourne equivalent of the prom
queen, wears to impress the boys and the technique of perfect
snogging is what Georgia is after, when she pays Peter (Liam
Hess) for lessons in the art. Just as well to get in some
practice, as Georgia's dream sex god Robbie (Johnson) and
his brother Tom (Sean Bourke) have just arrived at school.
But while Jas and Tom get it together pretty quickly, Georgia
has to work hard to get Robbie to notice her and in her innocence
and awkwardness, usually gets it wrong. There's a very funny
sequence, with which many of us will identify, where she
tries to hide from her beloved the fact that she's got orange
legs from a botched attempt to get a sexy tan from a bottle.
Groome is captivatingly funny and charmingly puppyish in
the lead role but in fact all the young actors are good,
while Johnson as Robbie is indeed a young sex god in the
making. Davies has a disappointingly smallish role, in that
the plot demands that he disappear to New Zealand on business
for much of the film, leaving Georgia to be distracted from
her teenage obsessions by the fact that there seems to be
something going on between her mum and the George Clooney
lookalike builder (Steve Jones), who's working on their house.
The story is of course predictable, in that we know that
Georgia's going to go through a load of trials and tribulations
before she gets her boy and indeed grows up a bit but it
really captures that sense of discovery on the part of girls
about boys, and how once we're on the trail, we tend to put
the boyfriend before anyone else in our life. It's all very
innocent and charming and aimed fair and square at the early
teen audience but we adults may well find it stirs nostalgic
and sometimes slightly embarrassing memories of our own youth.
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