AllMovie

Julien Temple's wildly stylized musical adaptation of Colin MacInnes' novel is a dazzling blend of music, dance, and visual effects, reminiscent of a two-hour video in the best sense. Set in the pre-swinging London of 1958, it centers on the tribulations of a young working-class photographer (Eddie O'Connell) anxious to impress a former girlfriend (Patsy Kensit) already moving up in the world. Evocative of the Minnelli and Gene Kelly musicals of the '50s, the film also reflects Vegas revues, with a visual style grounded in swooping crane movements and smoothly interlocking tracking shots which never seem to end. As it could be only in Temple's fantasy world, jazz is its lingua franca, with a coruscating patchwork score by the venerable Gil Evans that samples the music of Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and other luminaries of the period. Given the limitations of O'Connell, Kensit, and the thin script, the film lags when the music stops and they're required to act, but most of the time the director uses them virtually as animatronic figures reacting in the simplest manner to the spectacle constantly spinning about them. In a film that touts the retro appeal of a martini and a smoke, David Bowie's Mephistophilean ad man is an emblem of its fascination with seductive surfaces.