Try a different angle?

There is another way of reading this film, which I find quite rewarding and which makes up for the perceived „lack“ of psycological depth of the plot. Obviously, all the quite superb images of urban and rural settings must be there for some reason? (The occasion I remembered and re-viewed the film after 18 years (!) was a long walk along the River Thames.)

Focus on the respective surroundings of the main characters, and you will see that there are two cultures clashing here, which both come from the very same origin: The ultra-urban backdrop of the younger, male character, who is ambitious and confident and boldly ventures out to build new cities and worlds, who believes that everything is possible, and still is sensitive enough to realize, at one point, that somehow Things Have Gone Wrong: all human scale has been lost (perfectly visualized by the empty shopping mall and the exciting, amazing images of Docklands-in-the-making). Love has become lethal (even for the well-meaning, as Richards boss) and the brave new world is utterly devoid of people and “harder to get in than Ford Knox”.

Compare this to the wonderful serenity and tranquility of traditional English country life as in the backdrop of the older, female character! Is this not how life should be for everyone? Yet there are deep cracks in this paradise as well: it is quite bleached-out by what was at that time still called the “Greenhouse-effect”, and, of course, it is (and probably always was) only available to Very Rich People who made loads of money with industrialized surrogate food (margarine). And the female character is not at all as poised and self-confident as someone who is well-rooted in tradition and careless wealth. She is not self-confident, not at ease at all, does not know who she is, and is attracted and intrigued by the promise that “everything is possible” (which has at no point worked for her.)

Both settings / siblings have the same origin in Britain’s post-war consumerist and economic development, though, with most of the population being of modest urban origin. They started off together and cannot be separated, but have been estranged, especially during the Thatcher-era, and when both millieus (their protagonists) realize by the end of the 1980s that There Is Something Wrong With Their Worlds, they meet again, and fascination and a sense of loss turn into a potentially lethal obsession without any perspective (in which the male/urban/engineer character collapses first). And this would be the main question of the film if read on this level: Where will we go from this mess? How can we get things right again in terms of humain habitat and a “good life” for people? What is to become of us and our living and social environment?

The film can obviously give no answers, but it is a fantastic and poetic way of putting the question. And instead of just being anti-modernist in tendency, which would be quite boring, it conveys fascination with both of the fake paradises, old and new. (Even the ringing of church bells after the meeting in the bourgeois parents’ flat has its equivalent in the urban setting: the hollow clink-clank of scaffolding after the encounter in Richards converted warehouse flat. I love that bit!)

The film is so British, especially in the wonderful and ambiguous Sinclair-character, who manages to drag away the doomed couple from the abyss with humor, excentricity and wry common sense.

(Talking of Sinclair: Everybody knows, in theory, that too many mainstream movies and celebrity cult can drain your brains out - but I find it quite shocking and pretty devastating to read the real-life effects on people on this website. Poor Alan Rickman and Clive Owen!)

And the truly ingenious part is that the film has so many and so vivid sex scenes, which, with all the allegory and symbolism, prevent it from becoming a complete mind-*beep*. [see what I mean?] It is such a relief, (and, 20 years after the making, a revelation) to see some fresh, “natural” and not over-asthetisized sex-scenes with the real bodies of real actors, female and male. (There is no way they would be doing this today, 20 years later!) It made me realize how much we have got used to blurs, and music dubbing and body-doubles and all that, and how all the body/sexual power has been dumped into porn and left only phony clichees for major narrative film.

Can anybody come along with this interpretation?

(P.S.: der grässliche deutsche Verleihtitel lässt eine noch grässlichere deutsche Synchronfassung befürchten. Hände weg!)