Coming Up Roses (UK, 1986) 93 min color DIR: Stephen Bayly. SCR: Ruth Carter. PROD: Linda James. MUSIC: Michael Storey. DOP: Dick Pope. CAST: Dafydd Hywel, Gillian Elisa, Mari Emlyn. (Skouras Pictures)
Trevor (Dafydd Hywel), custodian of The Rex, a cinema in the South Wales town of Aberdare, lives in a boarding house. He is constantly telling his neighbour, a would-be musician, to keep the noise down. (The man bangs on the drums all night.) After The Rex closes, Trevor lets him and his “band” rehearse there. Later, Trevor is home listening to a little radio, and the drummer tells him to keep it down. There are many wonderful moments just like that. This Welsh film (with subtitles) is a quirky comedy with characters and relationships that are inspired, and make this well worth watching…. even if you don’t much like the running gag. Trevor and other out-of-work people, in this town full of unemployment, start a mushroom business in the empty theatre. Perfect place for it, really- it’s dark, and most of today’s cinema is “shit”, right? There is so much more going on, that you don’t care if the central motif doesn’t really work, other than as an excuse to get all of the characters together. This richly written movie parallels the cinema’s closure to the cessation of life itself in the town. Further, I like the repetitive patterns that operate throughout: the recurrent scenes in the coffee shop where the townsfolk vent their frustrations; or every time the lead character visits a friend, one more item is repossessed. It is the small moments you remember more than the weak central plot—like when Trevor is cleaning the locked-up cinema, and gets barraged by someone banging on the door, needing to use the bathroom!
Originally published in “Short Takes”, Vol. #1, Issue #11. This column, which randomly collected capsule reviews of films, for once had a theme: all the movies were previously broadcast on Jay Scott’s Film International program.
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.