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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

The Line of Beauty

18:08 / 17.05.06

(For reference, the Books threads on The Line of Beauty: vanilla version and faintly theory-flavoured remix.)

It's on in around an hour's time, and this is a hubba-hubba anticipatory thread because I'm really looking forward to this. I liked the book a good bit more than Xoc did (I think I like Hollinghurst generally more than he does) and people are making the right noises about Andrew Davies' adaptation. Have to say, though, I've been mildly narked by some of the things Davies has said in interviews about The Line of Beauty over the past year or so - just kind of overemphasising his own heterosexuality by burbling on about how, in order not to find the sex scenes repulsive, he substituted women, in his own mind, for men. This is the guy that boasted of making the Tipping the Velvet adaptation "absolutely filthy", so male heterosexuality would appear to map directly onto girl-on-girl being hurhurhurfabulous and boy-on-boy being vomitusvile. Or thereabouts.

Aaanyway, my own narkings aside, I have high hopes for this. Let's see...

18:15 / 17.05.06

Faaaaaaaak! I really want to watch this. I loved, loved, loved the novel but I have to go bastard out.

Does anyone know if it's going to be repeated (soon)?

18:18 / 17.05.06

Will probably be available on DVD within the month.

18:27 / 17.05.06

I was already interested in watching this, and now I want to get a hold of the book, too..

20:04 / 17.05.06

Nick coming over more sympathetically on tv but I guess he is more sympathetic earlier in the book. The guy playing him is acting up a storm too. And such blue, blue eyes. Could be Fremen.

All well realised and the plush environs seem more opulent than I imagined. As in the book, Toby seems oddly distant, given how integral his friendship with Nick is to the plot.

Wani looking too insubstantial somehow. Leo was a cutie though, and coming over as two pages ahead of Nick, plotwise, as he does in the book.

Was pissed off when it stopped and looking forward to next week. Maybe if there had been the music in the book it would have hooked me as much as this has.

21:22 / 17.05.06

I also liked the music. It made me nostalgic for a Britain I'd never experienced, in a strange way.

>>Note to self: get book this week!<<

21:34 / 17.05.06

I also wasn't sure about this having read about some of Davies' comments but pleasantly it appeared only a marginally sanitised account, even including some pleasingly erotic character point of view shots which really brought out the intimacies of the situation. Plotwise, (not having read the novel), it'll be interesting where it'll all go.

22:02 / 17.05.06

Davies was actually quoted in an interview in this week's Time Out on the point-of-view bits of the sex scenes. Apparently, if the camera pulls back and it's all seen from afar, viewers feel uncomfortably voyeuristic - whereas a good mix of eyes, mouths and bits makes 'em feel part of the action.

I really liked it - although, like Xoc, I expected both Wani and Toby to be more attractively burly. Leo was lovely, in a sleek, seal-like way, and really brought the character to life, and Nick himself was attractively callow (in the book, he can come across as irritatingly apolitical). His obsequious fascination with the Feddens' wealth somehow didn't seem as creepy (although it did border on it at times). There was a lightness of touch onscreen. I'm really looking forward to seeing how Davies' version manages Nick becoming gradually less wide-eyed and less sympathetic...

05:00 / 18.05.06

Also enjoyed that.

There were a couple of 'do you see?!' moments, especially the last scene, when the rolls pulled up, but over all, a pretty decent adaptation, with nothing too painful cut. It was a shame about Toby, but he probably did have to go

It'll be interesting to see how they fit the rest of the book into two hours of TV though. If memory serves, it's a lot more plot-heavy.

07:32 / 18.05.06

Boboss, BBC2 website has the whole first ep for free.

09:02 / 18.05.06

Hahaha, we get Tipping the Velvet and the boys get this! WE WIN!!

I may be old-fashioned, but I think that if you're going to have a story in which nothing happens, you should put some characters into it, rather than having a cast of Racist Tories, HIV+ Camp Gay Antique Dealers, and Religious Working-Class Black Matriarchs revolving round a Fucked-Up Posh Girl and, well, Nick. What's going on with Nick? I have just watched him for an hour and I have no idea what he's like, beyond 'a bit passive and overly impressed with the rich'. Oh, and 'looks like the love-child of Christian Bale and Hugh Grant', which isn't a bad thing.

Ganesh - interesting about the rationale behind the filming of the sex-scenes being to draw us in, since the thing I commented on at the time was that it was very hard to tell what was going on in the sex scenes (apt from 'cock going into arse') - there was no detail and no affect, hence no identification, at least for me. I'm probably spoiled by reading slash (incredibly slowed-down and detailed breakdowns of physical and mental sensations), though, and/or I have a bit of a kink for representations of sex which acknowledge physical awkwardness, negotiation, learning, etc.

in order not to find the sex scenes repulsive, he substituted women, in his own mind, for men

And the director substituted them on the screen! Did anyone else notice that bit where Nick was stalking the sexually-available waiter at the party and our view of the waiter was obscured (for the entire duration of the shot) by some tits going past in slow motion? I thought visually it was framed in an incredibly non-homoerotic way, that being the most egregious example...

lord nuneaton savage

09:56 / 18.05.06

"There were a couple of 'do you see?!' moments"

Agreed. I haven't read the book (although after last night's episode I'll be giving it a punt) but the bit where they're looking at the picture and reflecting on its title ("The Shadow of Death", if I recall correctly) seemed a pretty obvious way of saying "AIDS IS COMING! AIDS IS COMING!".

Plus, and only due to personal experience, I have an extreme aversion to watching posh people getting twatted at garden parties. Yah, you're wild. Yah, you're crazy. Yah, YOU'RE ANNOYING ME SO MUCH MY EYEBALLS ARE GOING TO EXPLODE.

11:34 / 18.05.06

Thanks, Cuboid!

11:42 / 18.05.06

As I had just finished watching Match Point perhaps purely because of vague thematic cross-over I did get some sense of Nick's attempts to inveigle himself into the family's heart with noted absence of real affection. But yeah I didn't really get a sense of Nick either, he seemed sweet, but meandering and not exactly brimming over with personality. Also, I was slightly irked given the apparent briefness of his relationship with Leo(?) about how traumatised Nick seemed at their relationship's curtailment. Was the passage of a longer time improperly conveyed?

Ganesh-good to hear that I'm developing a critical eye for cinematic technique, then. College paying off shocka'.

Ruchbah me, Armaduras

13:30 / 18.05.06

With regards to Nick's sob-sob-gasp-gasp about Leo moving on, my interpretation is simply that this despite an attempt at swagger, this is his first relationship, he moves too fast, gets in too deep. Somebody uplist refers to Nick as more apolitical in the novel, and I think that's vital to the story - that Nick is a bit of a wide-eyed aesthete, concerned with style and beauty, doesn't engage politically with the world (one senses his neat sidesteps out of embarrassing Aren't-the-coloureds-a-problem moments are actually born of apathy: It's amusing that we disagree, you arsehole, and that I can see it and that you can't, but nothing need come of it).

That there are deeper reasons for his hosts' wealth, his friend's self-harming, his own hang-ups, doesn't register with him. He's fascinated by the veneer, the simpler ideal of beauty.

14:44 / 18.05.06

It's not only Nick's first relationship; it's his first proper sexual encounter (if I remember rightly). He's naive and becomes very involved very fast. I found the wobbly-lip moment on the pavement quite convincing, really.

Nick is spectactularly passive (other than sexually), and his surname - Guest - sums him up, really. He's not just a guest but a sort of ghost in the Feddens' house, there but not there. He's an aesthete (coos over paintings and furniture) who, I think, believes implicitly that (the pursuit of) beauty is its own philosophy, independent of politics. The Line of Beauty is, on one level, an unfolding illustration of the flaws in that line of thinking. If one sits on the fence to gaze at the stars, one gets a prong up one's arse.

I don't agree that nothing happens, and I don't agree that there are no characters. The Line of Beauty is, in common with most of Hollinghurst's stuff, slow to get going, an odd mixture of languid and detached. It's a while since I read the novel, but I seem to recall it as being in three stages, with rather abrupt breaks between (just as one starts to warm up to the Nick/Leo pairing, it's over and we're onto summat else). I'm very much looking forward to the Hampstead Ponds scenes, since those were, for me, suffused with a kind of 'golden summers of youth' erotic nostalgia...

14:48 / 18.05.06

Incidentally, did any other UK thirtysomething get the teensiest of illicit thrills at seeing Floella Benjamin - Floella Benjamin! - in a production featuring al fresco bumsex?

09:54 / 21.05.06

Ha! So glad you pointed it out Ganesh- I spent the entirety of that scene trying to place her! She's looking quite wiry though, eh? Unlike poor old Tim Mcinnery, who, with his curly ginger mop, kept conjuring up images of Hillary Briss, the demon butche of Royston Vasey.

I thought this was a very competent bit of television- the acting, direction etc were all of a consistently high quality. Already I feel drawn in. I think the 'characterlessness' people are seeing is entirely intentional- at this stage, Nick is entirely adopting an empty persona, so as to fit in.

Being a bit presumptuous here on the basis of my seeing verious Jamesian parallels at work in the narrative, but would I be right in guessing that maybe Nick's gradual distancing from the family might be due to their not being all they might seem to be? Going out on a limb here, but if anyone's familiar with "The Pupil", am I thinking along the right lines?

21:14 / 26.05.06

Does anyone know when this is repeated? I do remember watching the repeated show over the weekend after coming home from the pub but the day and time alludes me. (Tv guide hasn't been helpful nor the BBC website).

10:03 / 01.06.06

So, the final episode aired last night. Fantastic- I, for one, really enjoyed it. Not one flaw I could pull fron the whole thing- I thought that any accusations raised about Nick's character being 'shallow' etc were roundly quashed by this part, in which he realised both how odd his spending 4 years with the family was and was finally stirred to some form of (shouty, sweary) action.

Question for anyone who has actually read it:
do we ever find out the results of Nick's test?

12:54 / 01.06.06

We don't, Mr Mick. But it's strongly suggested the result won't be good. Which given the time it was set in, and how much I, anyway, liked the character by the end, seemed, when I read it, to be a bit too much of a punishment. All Nick does is watch events go by, in a coked-out haze, and ... well there's nothing too wrong with that, surely?

Then again, I've never been sure about the idea of the novelist as a moral authority - you get up at lunchtime, you have to write, I don't know, about a thousand words a day, which is easily do-able, if you're talented, when you're out of your mind on a long list of drugs, and conducting a series of messy affairs, so who is the novelist really in a position to criticise? The easy moral (Jamesian?) lesson at the end of the book struck a false note anyway, personally. People routinely get away with all kinds of terrible things in the non-fiction world, so it seems pointless, artistically, to pretend otherwise. Damnit.

14:49 / 01.06.06

*threadrot*

Well, James is all about good people falling foul of a cruel existence Mr. Grandma, so it might fit with that.

Sorry to info dump, but I've just written a paper on him.James is very acute in his sense of ambiguity: While it is clear who the good and bad might be, he really likes to mess with our heads as far as endings go. The most famous e.g. would be 'Turn of the Screw', with which I am sure you're familiar. Although the villainous/negative presence is always abundantly clear (the ghosts or, if you wish, modernity manifested as the supernatural) what he brings into question is the death of an innocent and who is truly responsible.

Sorry for that..I bloody love James (I almost wept at the comment somewhere in books by someone who said they didn't like anything pre. 1900...that'll be most books ever, then)...

*end of threadrot*

I really did enjoy it though, Nick's character went through a wonderful transformative arc. Hollinghurst was surprisingly sensitive to a character who could have played out as a terrible shit- I wonder, given the comments made about him covering the same material a lot- how much it's all based on personal experiences...

17:45 / 01.06.06

We don't, Mr Mick. But it's strongly suggested the result won't be good.

I think it's important to note that it's Nick who thinks the results won't be good, which makes sense as the world he's inhabited for the last four years is dead as a dead thing. Of course the author is going for resonance, but I think it's a perfectly reasonable response to the text to disregard any clairvoyance on Nick's behalf and treat the results as an unknown.