Bright Young Things – 2003 | 108 mins | Comedy, Drama | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Debut director Stephen Fry adapts Evelyn Waugh’s social satire “Vile Bodies” for the screen in this delightfully decadent romp. A frenetically paced first picture, it’s bursting with characters that Fry wishes us to feel empathy with despite their superficiality.

1930s London. Aspiring yet penniless author Adam Symesn (Moore) needs to get enough money to marry his beautiful fiancée Nina (Mortimer). The couple occupy their time in the company of Adam’s friends, Miles (Sheen) and Agatha (Woolgar) – eccentric, wild, decadent and entirely shocking to the older generation. Their world is that of the very young, wild, party-loving creatures new to gramophone records and the telephone – this is a self-consciously modern generation that cannot keep still for a second. They are the celebrity socialites of their day, known to the press, who follow their every move, as the Bright Young Things. To earn money, Adam is forced to take up work as a gossip columnist, reporting on the hedonistic activities of himself and his privileged friends for ‘The Daily Excess’, owned by pompous Canadian newspaper tycoon Lord Monomark (Aykroyd), Inevitably, what goes up must come down, and the bleaker second half of the film focuses on their crash and burn as WWII nears.