Twenty-One Reviews

Patsy Kensit gives a shallow performance in TWENTY-ONE, a shallow film about a shallow woman and her shallow life. Under Don Boyd's resolutely uninflected direction, and with no strong narrative point-of-view, it's a movie you either "get" or "don't get." And if you don't get it, don't ask. Like the heroine of a frothy 1950s romantic comedy, Katie (Kensit) lives in a nicely furnished London flat, wears stylish clothes, eats in nice restaurants and seems to have a lot of leisure time despite barely working as an office temporary. In her life are three men, one she is obsessivley involved with, one she keeps for sex and the third, her father, who is the only man she adores. The first, Bobby (Rufus Sewell), is an impotent, sniveling junkie who regularly hits her up for money to feed his habit. Katie's sexual outlet is Kenneth (Jack Shepherd), a married barrister, whom she seduces on his wedding day after showing up in a see-through dress. Such tribulations as there are revolve around the impending breakup of her parents' marriage. Jack (Patrick Ryecart), a bumbling, naive car salesman, still believes he can patch things up with his faithless wife (Rebecca Cardinale), who's having a fling with her piano teacher. Kate provides him comfort while using a little old-fashioned sex appeal to help him close a sale. She also finds time to hang out with Francesca (Sophie Thompson), an even shallower girlfriend, and the likable Baldie (Maynard Eziashi, as much a scene-stealer here as he was in MISTER JOHNSON), her platonic musician boyfriend. A climax of sorts occurs when Bobby dies of an overdose, prompting Kate's decision, shared with the audience while she's sitting on the toilet, to move to America. Formally, TWENTY-ONE resembles such "swinging 60s" British films as ALFIE and GEORGY GIRL, in which the slickness of the film's style is undercut by the pain of its characters, accented by anti-illusionist devices like having the characters speak directly into the camera, as Katie does here, prattling on ad nauseam while belaboring the obvious. The possible intent may have been to make an ironic commentary by processing the depleted 90s through a 60s prism. That would at least explain the casting of Patsy Kensit, who's almost painfully inadequate to the demands of what amounts to an extended monologue. Though she gets scant help from a pedestrian script, it seems beyond her grasp to make Katie in any way a unique or compelling character. Instead, we watch Kensit straining to prove she can act in what amounts to a resume film that does little beyond exposing her inability to convey a single genuine emotion in front of the camera. One unfortunate effect is to make her scenes teeter on the edge of camp in a film that otherwise works all too well in creating a feeling of emptiness and waste--an emptiness of talent and a waste of time. (Substance abuse, profanity, sexual situations.)