(This is a preview. My full review will appear next month when the film gets its US theatrical release.)



Rude play among young English toffs

Lone Scherfig’s The Riot Club, adapted from Laura Wade’s play Posh, is about a centuries old highly elite little Oxford drinking society whose members are very upper class. A thing that still matters deeply in England. Let's take the positive tack to this somewhat controversial piece, and say with the urbane Peter Debruge of Variety, that Scherfig approaches this milieu, as a woman and a Dane as well as merely not a toff, "with shrewd anthropological wit." But at the same time we acknowledge the criticism from those comparing the film with Laura Wade's successful Royal Court Theatre play (adapted by the author herself here), that the satire has been softened in the interest of feeding sympathy for these young men. The camera after all loves them, and one of them says their choice of a new member is the "prettiest" candidate: some of the actors are indeed pretty young men, and they all look fine in their tail coats at the tavern dinner that's the main focus of the play, much embroidered by Oxford university scenes for the screen version. We must acknowledge that the film has a momentum and growing sense of dread and repulsion that are neatly modulated. But also that we've seen keener delineations of British class. This is not a masterpiece. It is a good movie about a juicy subject rarely so well dramatized.

The Riot Club, 107 mins., debuted at Toronto, opened in English, Ireland and Italy shortly thereafter. It has also been shown at various international festivals, at in the Mostly British festival in San Francisco (where Scherfig's admired debut feature An Education showed five years ago) 7:30 pm Thurs. 19 Feb.. It has its limited US theatrical release starting 27 March 2015.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.