Two of Hoskins's most memorable films, The Long Good Friday, set amid the decay of London's docklands in the Seventies before gentrification set in, and Mona Lisa, in which he played a driver charged with ferrying a high-class call girl, depicted a city which was either in decline or simply hole-in-the-wall seedy. It always seemed particularly hard for London to rise to the occasion on film; its grey tattiness always worked best as the backdrop for a certain sort of clichéd urban grittiness. Too heavy for romance and too parochial for big scale action — it was always more The Sweeney than The French Connection — London only really came into its own as an all-purpose setting for Olden Times. The majestic colonnades of the Royal Naval Hospital, just along the road from me on the banks of the river at Greenwich, have stood in for everything from Tsarist St Petersburg (for Crime and Punishment) to revolutionary Paris (Les Misérables) and been pressed into service for enough movies set in 18th-century Whitehall to give them an identity crisis.
This cinematic treatment of London has certainly changed in the past decade or so, as it has become a different kind of city. It has gone in two distinct directions: there's the glossy and loved-up oeuvre of Richard Curtis, or the gangster and geezer version, pioneered by Guy Ritchie, which now seems to form a whole sub-genre. Rupert Everett beautifully summed up Curtis when he described him as the Leni Riefenstahl of Blair's Britain: all liberal sensibility, multicultural harmony and well-meaning posh chaps. When seen from a Notting Hill window, this shiny, happy London — easy in its own skin, as the cliché has it — certainly looks like a great place to be. Less inviting on the other hand but with a new, harsh glamour, the crime-ridden world of movies such as RocknRolla and Layer Cake portrays a city of designer suits, good-looking hard men and billionaire interlopers.
What these pictures of London have in common, however, is a distinct air of self-consciousness. While we might recognise aspects of the city in each, neither version feels genuinely familiar. Few of Curtis's characters could now afford to inhabit their beloved West London, which, with its acres of empty investment properties, is in danger of becoming a ghost town. And Ritchie's duckers and divers look increasingly like exercises in masculine nostalgia. Neither Michael Caine nor Bob Hoskins would, I'm sure, feel much at home in either landscape.
This cinematic treatment of London has certainly changed in the past decade or so, as it has become a different kind of city. It has gone in two distinct directions: there's the glossy and loved-up oeuvre of Richard Curtis, or the gangster and geezer version, pioneered by Guy Ritchie, which now seems to form a whole sub-genre. Rupert Everett beautifully summed up Curtis when he described him as the Leni Riefenstahl of Blair's Britain: all liberal sensibility, multicultural harmony and well-meaning posh chaps. When seen from a Notting Hill window, this shiny, happy London — easy in its own skin, as the cliché has it — certainly looks like a great place to be. Less inviting on the other hand but with a new, harsh glamour, the crime-ridden world of movies such as RocknRolla and Layer Cake portrays a city of designer suits, good-looking hard men and billionaire interlopers.
What these pictures of London have in common, however, is a distinct air of self-consciousness. While we might recognise aspects of the city in each, neither version feels genuinely familiar. Few of Curtis's characters could now afford to inhabit their beloved West London, which, with its acres of empty investment properties, is in danger of becoming a ghost town. And Ritchie's duckers and divers look increasingly like exercises in masculine nostalgia. Neither Michael Caine nor Bob Hoskins would, I'm sure, feel much at home in either landscape.
Like this article? Share, save or print using the icons below:
