Coming of age.

Abstract

D UURING THE late 1980s, English (and Irish) filmmaking experienced a kind of renaissance. Writers and directors like Neil Jordan, Stephen Frears, Hanif Kureishi, Mike Leigh, David Leland, Jim Sheridan, Jack Clayton, Clare Peploe, Kenneth Branagh, Peter Ormrod and Chris Menges were producing some of the most enjoyable and exciting work you could see at the movies. Even some of the minor releases out of Great Britain, like A Room with a View, Withnail and I, and Rita, Sue and Bob, Too, had a freshness that wasn't available in many American pictures, or in just about anything from the continent that made it to our art houses. You don't hear movie buffs talking about English movies in the same way these days, and with the odd glorious exception like Leigh's Topsy-Turvy, when critics or audiences go wild over a new import it's likely to be something that sticks to your hands (like The Full Monty) or that you feel sure you've seen already (like Sense and Sensibility). Yet the evidence of my moviegoing over the past few years tells me that the British are once again making some of the most interesting pictures you can see-that is, if you can actually see them. Two years ago the scathingly perceptive Hollow Reed, with Joely Richardson and Martin Donovan as ex-spouses embattled over the issue of their abused son, sneaked in and out of theaters like a thief in the night. The Boston Society of Film Critics brought at least a little attention to Carine Adler's stirring debut picture, 1998's Under the Skin, when it voted Adler best new filmmaker and her star, Samantha Morton, best actress. But insufficient attention was paid to Michael Winterbottom's tense, affecting political drama Welcome to Sarajevo in 1997. Only a few major American cities are likely to receive 42 Up, the exhilarating latest in Michael Apted's documentary series about a group of English schoolchildren viewed at seven-year intervals. The handful of reviewers who rallied over last summer' s My Son the Fanatic-which should have been trumpeted as Hanif Kureishi's triumphant return to screenwriting-failed to keep it alive, and though East Is East, another vivifying exploration of Anglo-Pakistani life, was set for a fall release, as of this writing it hasn't appeared. I saw it at last year's Montreal Film Festival, where the two most beautiful entries I encountered, Dreaming of Joseph Lees and The Darkest Light, also hailed from England. Joseph Lees had an aborted distribution in the fall; almost no one I recommended it to lived in a city that opened it. The Darkest Light still lacks a distributor. Their near-invisibility notwithstanding, Dreaming of Joseph Lees and The Darkest Light are among the small movie treasures of the final years of the twentieth century. So is Philip Saville's film version of the Julian Barnes novel Metroland, which took half a year to make the trip from England to America, then flickered out quietly. (You can rent it on video.) All three are coming-of-age pictures, though their styles bear little resemblance to each other, and they all take place in different eras and in different parts of the country. Dreaming of Joseph Lees, an almost perfectly realized example of a certain kind of lyrical-psychological moviemaking, is set in Somerset in the late Fifties, where the heroine, Eva (played by Samantha Morton), works in a mill. The Darkest Light takes us to contemporary Yorkshire-sheep country-an4 its naturalism is brutal, jarring; its focus is a pair of young girls, one white and Catholic, one Indian and Hindu. Metroland, like Dreaming of Joseph Lees, encompasses an erotic awakening, but its narrative covers most of the Seventies, and its protagonist (Christian Bale) lives in the London suburbs (and briefly in Paris); it's the only one of the three you might conceivably call a comedy.