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If you've read the original novel, as I did, you will probably hate this thing.
The film version of _Absolute Beginners_ is a nightmarish conglomerate of 1980s anachronisms attempting to create a "period piece" set in the late 1950s and failing to re-create or even pay homage to that period -- the US monstrosity of _Dirty Dancing_ does similar to 1963, except that film proved financially successful despite having equally amateurish screen writing. In addition to suffering from "looking too 1980s", the characters have been changed, re-arranged, and downplayed to the point that the only characteristics they have in common with those of the novel are the slightest superficial looks and, of course, their names: Suze is transformed from the narrator's flighty ex-girlfriend and promiscuous negrophile who willingly plans to marry a closeted old queen for money (at her own admittance in the first few pages) into a hapless and naive "Eve"-archetype seduced by fame and glamour, exploited and somehow scammed into a sham marriage by her boss, who surprisingly wasn't given a Van Dyke and pointy hairstyle. She and the narrator, re-named "Colin" (after the book's author, Colin MacInnes) for the film, are also in a relationship.
Big Jill's character, a lesbian seemingly butch yet "fop like" in her mid-20s who acts as pimp to a cadre of young and bubble-headed lesbians, and one of the narrator's closest friends, dispensing frank wisdom to the narrator, is reduced to a sort of "named extra" with only a few throw-away lines, and tonnes of comical outfits.
The Fabulous Hoplite, a gay young man and another close friend of the narrator in the novel, is also reduced to the point of being pointless in the film, camped-up and all but ignored.
The narrator's father in the novel is a sort of sad minor character but in the film, he's played to come off as optimistic and oddly spirited despite the squalid neighbourhood, and the disarray of his marriage to the narrator's mum seems, for all practical purposes, ignored.
In its favour, the music (for what it is) is well-composed, and you have to give the production and writing crews credit for actually taking a line from the book ("...some days, they'll write musicals about the 1950s...") as their inspiration to write a musical, but in the world of bad camped-up musicals, this is among the most poorly executed in the bunch. Unlike _Shock Treatment_ or _Starstruck_ crucial plot elements are treated as afterthoughts. Unlike _The Apple_, there is a choppy and uneven flow between musical numbers and spoken dialogue.
You really can't blame it's "too 1980s" feel on the fact that it was created in the 1980s. The film version of _Annie_ released in 1981, pays a wonderfully well-executed tribute to the look and feel of New York City in the 1930s, and _Napolean Dynamite_ manages to capture a gritty sort of look and feel of the 1980s despite being made on a low budget in 2003 (though it's not explicitly set in the 1980s, those who lived through the decade cannot deny that the film "feels very 1980s"). Obviously, it was _possible_ to make something good out of this, especially considering the iconic status that the source novel has in the UK, but it fails most apparently in the look and feel, and also in its treatment of the source material, which is downright disrespectful.
Perhaps if you haven't read and have no intentions of reading the novel, you could enjoy this campy 1980s anachronism giving a shameful parody of late-1950s Soho London's modernist jazz set. I can definitely see what the writing team were attempting, but they definitely could have done better. With Boy George as a household name and mixed-race musicians and bands on the charts in 1986 UK, they definitely did _not_ need to bowdlerise the characters in the ways that they ended up doing. In fact, I'd go so far as saying that the writers wound up doing what both the book and film criticised harshly -- it ended up having a bunch of adults cranking out crap and treating its targeted teen-aged audience like two-bit idiots to make a quick buck off of.


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