Curls and Whirls

Blow Dry Review - Times 29th March 2001

Adam Mars Jones

Blow Dry is an enjoyable comedy, based on a screenplay by Simon (The Full Monty) Beaufoy. Beaufoy’s original title, Never Better, was more subtle — a cliché with an undercurrent, since one of the major characters has terminal cancer, and will never be better. Still, the new title has the advantage of hinting at the setting of the story: the British hairdressing championships, held in the Yorkshire town, more baffled than dazzled, of Keighley.

Not that the town hasn’t been a hotbed of creative coiffure in its day. But Phil Allen gave up his dreams and settled into being a high-street barber when his wife Shelley ran off with his favourite model. And Ray Robertson, another local scissor wizard, has gone South. Now he’s back, knowing that if he wins the title one more time he gets to keep the Silver Scissors award. If he ever had scruples about cheating, he’s shed them by now.

The film is extremely strongly cast: Josh Hartnett as Phil’s son Brian, who cuts the hair of the dead for practice; Rosemary Harris as a blind but indomitable matriarch. If Bill Nighy seems to be enjoying himself more as the ludicrous Ray, campily dignified even when surprised wearing curlers, than Alan Rickman as dour Phil, it may only be because Rickman has to do Yorkshire word order as well as the local accent. A disproportionate amount of his magic is bound up in that infinitely saturnine voice, and he seems to be dying a little when he delivers lines like, “A beauty, that is, Shelley”.

Ray and his assistant Louis (Hugh Bonneville) seem like lovers, though the sleeping arrangements at the remote farm where they are billeted aren’t made clear. In any case, no one speculates about them, and homophobia isn’t part of the townspeople’s attitude towards incomers, only towards their own — Shelley (Natasha Richardson) and Sandra (Rachel Griffiths). It’s odd that the film should focus on (attractive) lesbian crimpers at the expense of their male counterparts, but no doubt it has its reasons.

One of them may be that it’s easier to dramatise family issues in a way that will please everybody. As terminal illness imposes its own deadline, and the divided Allen family reluctantly comes together to enter the competition, you can think either that non-conformist relationships are being recognised — and about time too. Or that in a crisis only conventional family will do.

This surefire entertainment doesn’t rely on sexual politics, of course, for its appeal. It has a soundtrack of Seventies and Eighties classics, and a young American actress (Rachael Leigh Cook) to boost transatlantic appeal, in hopes of the The Full Monty lightning striking twice. Blow Dry has also taken a leaf out of Best in Show’s book by apparently staging its own hairdressing contest, and the montage sequences of the various heats are very droll.

 

 

Article copyright Times Newspapers Ltd 2001