Cemetery Junction (2010) - 95%
From the outset I should say that I love everything that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have collaborated on, and this is my all-time favourite film. Please don’t expect this to be a wholly sensible post, because I don’t think I can be wholly sensible when it comes to this film.
Cemetery Junction is a film about stifled ambitions and the suffocation of being young in a “town full of losers”, as Springsteen might put it, and the struggles inherent in “pulling out of here to win” - the lyric which inspired the idea for the film in fact. Freddie (the ludicrously dashing Christian Cooke), Bruce (the new Richard Ashcroft, Tom Hughes) and Snork (Jack Doolan) are three lad types in early 1970’s Reading who spend their weeks working deadend jobs, and their weekends drinking, fighting and looking for girls. But what happens when they’re too old for that? Will they end up as just another sad sack in the pub, who went from the local school to the local factory and never really lived? Well Freddie has higher hopes for himself, and when he runs into his childhood sweetheart Julie (the effulgent Felicity Jones), his expectations of life change completely. Blessed with a fantastic cast of young gems and established greats - personal favourite is probably the always understated Emily Watson (not Emma Watson mind you) - Cemetery Junction combines charm, comedy and romantic drama in a quintessentially English production.
Opening as it does with Vaughan Williams’ ‘Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus’ accompanied by sweeping panoramic views of beautiful countryside, Gervais has called it a love letter to England, and it is hard to disagree. Intentionally seen through rose-tinted spectacles, the people are beautiful and the days are bright and long. The directors were eager to give us a romantic view of what was essentially their own childhood (well, Ricky’s at least), and in doing so Gervais and Merchant wonderfully capture that sense of aspiration so common in the ‘70’s, as we immediately find Freddie applying for a job at the self-made millionaire Mr Kendrick’s (Ralph Fiennes) wood-panelled office. Set against this however, are Freddie’s working class friends and family. His father (Gervais) is a window cleaner and factory worker, in the same factory as Bruce, and illustrates perfectly the unfulfilled life in store for Freddie unless he can make a change.
Cemetery Junction has many great qualities, but one of the more obvious is the incredible soundtrack. Largely from the decade in which the film is set, we’re treated to early Elton John, Mott the Hoople, Zeppelin, and an excellent Slade rendition to name but four, all now inexorably linked in my mind to their corresponding scene.
I sort of don’t know how to sell this film to you without talking endlessly and frothing at the mouth. Suffice it to say, if you’ve ever felt trapped or frustrated in life then I think there is something in this for you and I heartily recommend.
95%
