From classic English cinema to the Swinging Sixties
In keeping with its independent, insular character, England developed an early penchant for cinema. An English inventor, Robert William Paul, was developing his own camera at the same time as the Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison. In the 1930s, to counter American hegemony, efforts were made to develop the film industry. Films were largely made in studios and indoors. Some of England's most famous directors, such as Alfred Hitchcock, cut their teeth in England, penning such classics as The 39 Steps (1935) and Secret Agent (1936), before succumbing to the siren song of Hollywood. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the directors were requisitioned to participate in the war effort. Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1943), which offers some precious views of bygone London, is the masterpiece, infinitely more nuanced than a simple propaganda film. As elsewhere, the post-war period was to be marked by an academic or classical cinema, offering a few jewels of melodrama and comedy, opposed by a rebellious cinema, embodying the ideals or malaise of youth. David Lean, who recreated Victorian London in the studio in his adaptations of Dickens(Great Expectations, 1946, Oliver Twist, 1948), is the most illustrious representative of this prestige cinema, which won the public's favor. In the 1950s, a literary movement known as the Angry Young Men heralded the New Wave of the 1960s, with directors such as Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, Peter Watkins and Lindsay Anderson seeking to overthrow bourgeois values. This momentum was inextricably linked with the explosion of rock and pop culture, which England embraced with enthusiasm. It was the time of Swinging London, of which Four Boys in the Wind (Richard Lester, 1964) is one of the birth certificates. With its unbridled inventiveness, the film captures the madness that was beatlemania, but the quintessence of the era is provided in color by Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966): chic, modern, motley and bewildering, it presents a world of seductive surfaces cracked by a murder, which we don't know whether or not it took place in Greenwich's Maryon Park. It's also the time of James Bond's film debut, and of Chapeau melon et bottes de cuir on TV. The city was booming, as evidenced on the comic side by Fantasmes (Stanley Donen, 1967) and the debut of Monthy Python's Flying Circus on the BBC in 1969. A year earlier, Polanski's Repulsion, a claustrophobic horror film starring Catherine Deneuve, set in a most disquieting South Kensington, indicated that anguish was brewing, and numerous films sealed this loss of bearings. In 1970, Performance (Nicholas Roeg, Donald Cammell), shot near Portobello Road in Notting Hill, marked the first film appearance of Mick Jagger, lead singer of the Rolling Stones, and provided an intriguing and stimulating encounter between the English crime film and the hippie rock culture, while Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End (1971), a love story with tragic overtones, masterfully captures the decrepit Soho of the time and its characteristic end-of-era flavor, in a film that was largely shot in Munich.
Disillusionment, nihilism... and romantic comedies
A year later, Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange unleashes the gang of thugs it stars in a nihilistic, post-apocalyptic London, in many ways foreshadowing the punk movement a few years later. Alex Cox offers a slightly sarcastic and disillusioned vision of this nihilism in Sid & Nancy (1986), a portrait of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his partner Nancy Spungen. Some of the film's settings, such as Oakwood Court in Holland Park or The Spice of Life, a famous Soho pub, take us back to a time when London, even in its most affluent districts, seemed considerably less subdued. One striking scene recreates a concert by the Sex Pistols, interrupted by the police, on a boat along the Thames in the middle of the Queen's Jubilee. Released in 1980, Blood on the Thames (John Mackenzie), a classic English crime film, seems to confirm that the mood is not one for gaiety, evoking the difficult economic situation, the threat posed by the IRA, the problems linked to corruption and so on in what is only on the surface a gangster film. Even a hilarious cult comedy like Withnail and Me (Bruce Robinson, 1987) contains a rare darkness, culminating in its conclusion on the outskirts of London Zoo, north of Regent's Park. Over the course of the decade, Ken Loach emerged as the representative of a social cinema committed to working alongside the most modest of people, as in Riff-Raff (1991), about a construction worker. In Mike Leigh's Naked (1993), the character's desperate wanderings through London are a more explicit expression of his disgust with what England has become under the Thatcher government. A few years earlier, Stephen Frears was more optimistic, telling the love story of a young immigrant of Pakistani origin and a skinhead played by Daniel Day-Lewis in popular, cosmopolitan London(My Beautiful Laundrette, 1986). The 90s saw the return of academic cinema, which flourished in historical films: Ang Lee, for example, adapted Jane Austen's novel Reason and Sentiment (1995). The Greenwich district, where many of the scenes were shot, is particularly recognizable. For Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998), although the production was American, most of the talent employed was English: the film, while lacking in originality, demonstrated undeniable savoir-faire in reviving the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, and was a huge success worldwide and at the Oscars. This venerable tradition would later be happily perpetuated in The King's Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010), or Dark Hours (Joe Wright, 2018), a wartime portrait of Winston Churchill, seen logically emerging from 10 Downing Street. In the tradition of the political film, we also note Stephen Frears' film about Elizabeth II in the days following Lady Di's death(The Queen, 2006), or a biopic starring Meryl Streep as the controversial Margaret Thatcher(The Iron Lady, Phyllida Lloyd, 2011). But what made the fortune of English cinema at the time was above all the romantic comedy, a seemingly stale genre to which Richard Curtis managed to breathe new life in a triumphant series of which Love Actually (2003) - starring Hugh Grant as a Prime Minister - presents itself as a kind of compilation. Before him, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love at First Sight in Notting Hill (Roger Mitchell, 1999) and Bridget Jones's Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001) rewrote the collective imagination of a romantic and idyllic London, where St Bartholomew the Great and other monuments loom large and familiar.
An increasingly flourishing scene
Detective films and gangster movies, the genre was revived by Guy Ritchie at the dawn of the 2000s, with Arnaques, crimes et botaniques (1998) and Snatch: Tu braques ou tu raques (2000), a blend of typically English glibness - with a Cockney accent, if you please - and Tarantino-style comic distancing. Croupier (Mike Hodge, 1998), starring Clive Owen as a casino worker, is a little-known masterpiece of the genre. Closer to home, David Cronenberg's Les Promesses de l'ombre (2007) explores the underworld of the Russian mafia and the Farringdon district north of the Thames. Spy films also remain particularly popular, from John Le Carré adaptations such as The Mole (Tomas Alfredson, 2011), on the less spectacular side, to the indefatigable James Bond series, which in Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012) transforms London into a vast playground, the pretext for impressive action scenes. A blend of horror and comedy, Shaun of the Dead (Joe Wright, 2004) revisits the zombie movie with, as they say, a wicked sense of humor. The city's and the English people's predilection for humor is particularly evident in the gritty satires We Are Four Lions (Chris Morris, 2010), which mocks the incompetence of a few terrorists planning to carry out an attack on the London Marathon, and In The Loop (Armando Iannucci, 2009), about the diplomatic imbroglios at play in high places, adapted from a series that ran for four seasons until 2012. It's true that London is a particularly fertile ground for series: it's impossible not to mention Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective based on Baker Street, an emblematic figure of the city brought up to date and propelled into the 21st century in a brilliant series whose inventiveness is a credit to Conan Doyle(Sherlock, 2010-2017). It's not an unrecognizable city, but a more gloomy one, that stands out in Luther, where Idriss Elba plays a police inspector investigating sordid murders. In a completely different style, Doctor Who (1963-2019), with its almost 900 episodes and incessant time travel, is a compendium of English wit and fantasy. The recent success of Fleabag (2016), which dramatizes the (many) sentimental tribulations of a thirty-something woman, also provides an insight into how the city is lived out on a daily basis. Many comedians, from Steve Coogan to Richard Ayoade to Ricky Gervais, got their start on TV before moving on to more ambitious or less light-hearted projects, as the case may be. The Double (Richard Ayode, 2013), for example, adapted from a short story by Dostoyevsky, is as uncomfortable as it is funny, in a mix of tones in which English humor is a master. In film, as in real life, London is more than just its most famous landmarks and buildings; it's an invitation to wander and take the byways. Dexter Fletcher, who has since directed biopics of Freddie Mercury and Elton John, among others, made his directorial debut with an excellent feel-good movie, Wild Bill (2011), set in the capital's more deprived neighborhoods, a far cry from the luxurious loft overlooking the Thames in Woody Allen's Match Point (2005), and recounting the complicated reunion of an ex-convict with his two children in a city preparing for the 2020 Olympic Games. Attack The Block (Joe Cornish, 2011) and Joue-la comme Beckham (Gurinder Chadhac, 2002), in different registers - the horrific action film and the social comedy - offer an insight into a city that has not cut itself off from its working-class roots and its suburbs.
Young and old alike have been moved and charmed by the adventures of Paddington Bear (2014 and 2017 for 2), as cute as he is clumsy. After arriving at Paddington station, he is taken in by a family living on the fictional street of Windsor Gardens (actually Crescent Chalcot in Primrose Hill). Mr. Gruber's antique store is located at 86 Portobello Road.
In 2020, director Sarah Gavron moved audiences with Rocks, a social drama bursting with energy. The film focuses on a teenager named Rocks, from the London suburbs, who finds herself abandoned overnight by her mother and does everything she can to escape social services. In 2021, Edgar Wright's excellent Last Night in Soho, with its sublime soundtrack of English songs from the early 1960s, is a veritable ode to the neighborhood, with its street exteriors filmed in Great Windmill, Old Compton, Carnaby, Greek and Berwick Street. The heroine's apartment is on Charlotte Street. Russell T. Davis' flamboyant mini-series It's a sin (2021) tells the tragic story of 4 young boys who discover the boundless freedom of gay London in the early 1980s, at the very beginning of the AIDS years.
