Soft Top Hard Shoulder

Miserably poor, but determined to make it as an illustrator in London, one day Gavin Bellini runs into his uncle Sal. Sal reminds Gavin of his father's 60th birthday party and warns him that if he doesn't show up he will lose his inhel-itance from the Bellini glass empire. Gavin tal
COMMENTARY
Take an idea by Jim Jarmusch, shoot it in wide-screen with the distinct color range of David Lynch, give the content a hint of Bill Forsyth's low-key everyday drama and the result is a wilful feature film debut by the Englishman Stefan Schwartz.
A poor and unsuccessful children's book illustrator in London is reminded by a relative of his father's impending birthday. The illustrator has to be in Glasgow within 36 hours if he is not to miss the party. He thinks this comes suddenly, until his uncle points out that it has been planned for sixty years. When our hero realizes that his inheritance is at stalAlong the way a hitch-hiker appears, the
car breaks down, the rain falls, it takes ages before the car is towed away, and after a night sleeping at a bed & breakfast the rest of the journey continues by bus or hitch-hiking. The couple bicker their way towards the end of the journey with wry English humour and unaffected elegans. The sweet and unneurotic middle-class youths become our and each others friends in the end, in a fairy-tale utterly devoid of decadence. There isn't even a kiss.
The director Stefan Schwartz occasionally punctures the realistic tone of the slow and low-key story. He turns an association into an image or winks at cinema history, as if he loses his patience in his carefully and technically precise kneading to make this low-budget muffin look lika a cream cake.
In Schwartz' beautiful landscape the people are neither good nor evil. Instead they are abnormally normal characters who neither drink nor fight. Here, ways of life that are virtually extinct on the movie screen are shown. Soft Top Hard Shoulder with its low-drama and high-ordinaryness becomes more exotic than Jurassic Park could ever be. Only the dinosaur Chris Rea's heavy-footed rock music interrupt
the subtle and homogeneous picture. ':'
Håkan Lahger

Medverkande
Peter Capaldi, Elaine Colins: Producent
Richard Holmes: Manus
Peter Capaldi: Foto
Henry Braham: Musik
Chris Rea: Talat språk
English