Hippie-hippie fake

Thursday, 2nd October 2008

Olivia Cole on why biopics of living writers and artists are rarely a love-in

‘Yesterday’s bohemian is now today’s trendy — yesterday’s avant garde is today’s kitsch.’ says Australian filmmaker and Oz pop artist Philippe Mora. And, you might add, almost bound to be the subject of a part-fact, part-fiction biopic riddled with schoolkid inaccuracies and embellishments and dragging writs in its wake. Biopics of the living or the recently living often encounter problems. The producers of Sylvia, in which Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were played by a longhaired Daniel Craig and miserable looking Gwyneth Paltrow, were unable to quote poetry pertinent to the narrative as the family refused permission. Hilary and Jackie a movie based of the life of Jacqueline du Pre also had its problems. The premiere was picketed by those who loathed its representation of the relationship between du Pre and her husband Daniel Barenboim and its producers were banned by Sony from using any of du Pre’s recordings. The transition to the screen of versions of relationships where some of the protagonists are still around to call foul is rarely smooth.

Although centred on a rude drawing of Rupert the Bear, the 1971 Oz trial and subsequent successful appeal against charges of obscenity created the free press as we know it today. However, like Factory Girl before it, Hippie Hippie Shake, Working Title’s film based on the events, is the latest rose-tinted, patchouli-scented vision to run into grown-up hippies armed with funds for ferocious lawyers: establishment ex-counter-culturalists adamant that they won’t be fodder for film-makers.

Hippie Hippie Shake purports to tell the story of Oz founder Richard Neville’s arrival in austere 1966 Britain, his friendships with every artistic Australian you can think of — from Germaine Greer (played by Emma Booth) who famously posed nude on its cover, to the artist Martin Sharp (played by Max Minghella) whose psychodelic art work created the Oz aesthetic. Naturally it’s set in ‘swinging’ London and features Sienna Miller as Neville’s astonishingly beautiful girlfriend, Louise Ferrier, opposite Cillian Murphy (best known for The Wind That Shakes the Barley) frolicking in and out of their kaftans, flares and beads. Adapted by Lee Hall (who wrote the hit film Billy Elliot) and directed by his wife Beeban Kidrun (who directed Working Title’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason), it’s based on Neville’s own colourful memoirs. Even so it’s hard not to groan when you read the unimaginative tag line: ‘The age of free love and flower power comes into full bloom’. Chill out man, however, is the hippie cliché so far most needed by the production and never more than now.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Next page