The light rhythms of the editing and the duration of every camera movement are so absolutely perfect, and every framing is so right... It's Boorman's first feature but the filmmaking is already his most mature. And the movie itself maintains a "mature outlook" on youth that somehow doesn't offer self-righteous
hindsight or patronizing nostalgia. Some of the acting inexperience of the Dave Clark Five had to be written around but there is a lot of good dialogue, and Barbara Ferris's performance keeps the story from becoming dippy.Catch Us If You Can has a wonderful documentary aspect, capturing of English streets against the commercial side of pop culture -- with the actors, fake ad campaign and the filmmaking apparatus being toted throughout the country. And it has a great centerpiece that the screenwriter won't let finish as sardonic: an inheritance-fed husband and wife, in a extended quarrel of a marriage, half-tries to seduce the young lovers ... but, as though by necessity of their aging faces, settle on proving that their spouse is jealous. They're confessed escapists, part-time vampires of youth culture. But in participating in the runaway couple's adventure, they somehow find themselves again and see each other -- unselfconsciously, at a costume party which adult hosts have stocked with youths -- as if the painful years had never transpired. It feels like a youthful wish implanted in the audience: wanting against all probability that the husband and wife will remember each other like that once the scene is over.
December 16, 2009
