Albatross Cinema Review

By Alice Sinclair

Set in a small English south-coast town, this coming-of-age film is sweet and funny, though occasionally misses subtlety in a need to labour its point. For example, we know each character has an albatross weighing them down because every lead has a variation on the line: “This thing hangs round my neck...”.

Rebel without a cause Emilia Doyle’s (Jessica Brown Findlay) proverbial bird is her oft-cited heritage: “My great-grandfather is Arthur Conan-Doyle” - which both aids and stunts her own literary ambitions. Bookish Beth (Felicity Jones), desperate to escape her home town by way of Oxford, is swotting for her A-levels while trying to ignore her parents’ constant battles. Her father Jonathan (Sebastian Koch) is a middle-aged novelist with one successful book twenty years’ behind him and writer’s block in its place. Bitter wife Joa (Julia Ormond), whose acting career dwindled years ago, now runs the hotel they live in and encourages her youngest daughter in ballet.

17-year-old Emilia starts working as a cleaner at the hotel, first striking up a friendship with Beth and then an ill-advised affair with Jonathan after he offers to tutor her, leading to inevitable disaster.

There is much to admire about a mostly intelligent and witty script, which avoids a mawkishness the genre often suffers from. Where writer Tamsin Rafn struggles is with Emilia, who she obviously cares for a lot. Ironically, this hurts the dialogue, as she levers too much of Emilia’s personality into awkward, ‘profound’ sound bites. The girl’s free-spiritedness also often tips over into obnoxiousness, making sympathy difficult. But perhaps that’s the point.

Felicity Jones in particular is impressive, capturing Beth’s dichotomy; she is caught between a desire to rebel and knowledge that good grades are her only escape. The two girls’ friendship is more interesting than the illicit affair, which nonetheless raises some interesting questions about a father’s role and responsibility, highlighted by a neat moment with a Great Gatsby quote.

While it hasn’t rewritten any rules, this is a gentle, satisfactory film depicting the claustrophobic boredom of adolescence and the thrill of new friendship. With a bit of polish, scriptwriter Rafn has a bucketful of potential.