Wonderland

Shirley Henderson - Debbie
Gina McKee - Nadia
Ian Hart - Dan
Molly Parker - Molly
John Simm - Eddie
Jack Shepherd - Bill
Stuart Townsend - Tim
Kika Markham - Eileen

At last, a British film that believes in magic - and even captures some of it on screen. Home-grown features that can hold their head up alongside their American and European peers have been thin on the ground over the last decade. Usually we must wait for old war-horses like Mike Leigh or Ken Loach, with all their shortcomings, to see British screen drama as beautifully rendered and rounded as Wonderland. Michael Winterbottom is less polemical than either, and more playful in his visual grammar - at times this multi-layered portrait of family life and love in late-'90s London blasts along like a pop video, but thankfully never succumbs to Cool Britannia shallowness.

Wonderland plots a long weekend in the lives of three lower middle class south London sisters, their bickering parents and absentee wastrel brother. It also breaks new ground by portraying the capital in all its unstylish, quirky, slightly shabby reality rather than opting for the heritage theme park or designer youth zone options of recent big-screen cliché. Filmed like a guerrilla documentary in genuine West End pubs and cafes with minimal crew, natural lighting and real people as extras, Winterbottom still manages to conjure visual poetry and quietly experimental interludes from a backdrop of grainy cine-verite.

The London of Wonderland is a restless sea of strangers, many from other parts of Britain, all hungry for love. The cast is uniformly excellent, although Ian Hart's shiftless Scouse wideboy deserves special mention for blowing away his twitchy misfit typecasting. Jack Shepherd is heartbreakingly good as a henpecked dad trying to dance away midlife disappointment with his frisky West Indian neighbour. But it is the peerless Gina McKee, of Brass Eye, Notting Hill and Our Friends In The North fame, who towers over the ensemble, cast as Nadia, the most sensitive of the three sisters whose volatile love lives form the film's dramatic core.

Perhaps it is significant that Wonderland was written by a Frenchman, Laurence Coriat, since it exudes the easy rhythms, tender mercies and universal humanist sentiments of the best modem Gallic cinema. Although it never attempts to ape either Paris or Hollywood, this film could equally have taken place in any European or North American city. In other words, Wonderland is great British cinema without a Union Jack or cartoon Cockney gangster in sight. It's This Life without all those revolting yuppies. Short Cuts meets Secrets & Lies. Magic realism plus real magic.
Review© Stephen Dalton