PERSONAL SERVICES
A film review by Jeff Meyer
Copyright 1987 Jeff Meyer
Seen at the Seattle Film Festival: PERSONAL SERVICES (Great Britain, 1986) Director: Terry Jones Screenwriter: David Leland Cast: Julie Walters, Alec McCowen, Shirley Stelfox, Danny Schiller
This is, unless you are rather prudish about sexual matters, a pretty funny film, but it really doesn't get rolling until after the first half-hour, so have a little patience. Maybe I was expecting too much; but with a director like Terry Jones (of MONTY PYTHON fame and thus a god to me :-) ), a writer like David Leland (who did MONA LISA last year), and Julie Walters (the actress who brought EDUCATING RITA to life), I was expecting some type of comedic Blitzkrieg. It isn't that, but it isn't bad, either.
We open with Walters, as a fairly rough woman who is losing her shirt sub-letting apartments to hookers in the city. Faced with financial ruin, she and her friends (a high-class hooker and her transsexual "maid") talk her into teaming up into a service specializing in elderly, kinky men...harmless in themselves, but liking to be chained to walls and pissed upon, to dress up in womens' clothes, or to get into old school uniforms and be spanked by the "headmistress." Soon their business begins burgeoning to the point that they must find a larger place to practice business, and they move to the suburbs... and this is where the film really takes off. While there are some funny sequences in the first half, much of it seems to be trying to make a dramatic point about the dreams Walters has of a married life, and the realities she must face in the real world.
The main theme of the film seems to be that tolerance of sexual eccentricity would make the world a better place. I must admit, I'd rather hang around the people in this movie than Jerry Falwell and his righteous legion any day. C+ for those who like bawdy laughs and can get by the English accents (B for the second half).
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
INTERNET: moriarty@tc.fluke.COM
Manual UUCP: {uw-beaver, sun, allegra, hplsla, lbl-csam}!fluke!moriarty
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews