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brilliantlove

1/10

Stars: Liam Browne, Nancy Trotter Landry, Michael Hodgson, Arabella Arnott

Director: Ashley Horner

When the leading characters in a film are called Noon (a girl) and Manchester, you're under suspicion of pretentiousness before you've started. Despite its nudity, rumpy-pumpy and sexually explicit language, this is a very un-erotic movie which, in its efforts to show an intense love, comes across as rather grubby instead.

Manchester (Browne) is a sort-of budding photographer who lives in a lock-up garage bordering on countryside with his very uninhibited girlfriend Noon (Landry), a taxidermist - the number of dead birds they come across is quite remarkable - who delights in turning him on by relating her previous affairs in graphic detail, that is when she's not peeing in the goldfish.

But their 18-certificate idyll turns sour when Manchester's intimate pictures of a naked Noon accidentally fall into the hands of porn film-maker Frannie (Hodgson), who decides that Manchester is God's gift to erotic photography, and arranges an exhibition of Noon's naughty bits which is greeted with wild enthusiasm by the fringe-art crowd, even when Manchester gets drunk and pees on the gallery floor.

Methinks director Horner thinks, like Manchester, to pull the wool over our eyes and make us believe that this is something resembling art. It is, in fact, a semi-amateur attempt at dragging in a certain kind of audience that recalls earlier, and softer-porn attempts in the British cinema few decades ago. Goodness knows, though, why it was filmed in widescreen.




David Quinlan

UK 2010. UK Distributor: Soda Pictures. Colour.
97 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 18.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 3, Violence/Horror 0, Drugs 2, Swearing 3.

Review date: 09 Nov 2010