Spice World (1997) 89m
SPICE WORLD is like a jigsaw puzzle in reverse: you start with the completed picture and then dismantle it piece by piece, revealing how the whole thing was locked together to begin with. It's an obvious metaphor for film criticism, but with a textbook example such as this, there is very little beyond the obvious. The same processes for its criticism are responsible for its creation ; you can almost hear the production meetings behind every scene.
For a brief period near the end of the 90s, the five-girl pop group Spice Girls saw a meteoric rise to fame and fortune – would that shooting star have turned out to have been more akin to Halley's instead of the Shoemaker-Levy they might have lasted longer before plunging back down into the atmosphere just as suddenly – garnering legions of young fans and saturating the mass media with their visages and, occasionally, music. As with any other product, the group was marketed with a slogan, ‘Girl Power' and the Girls themselves were similarly packaged with the epithets Sporty, Angry, Ginger, Baby and Posh. It's the same strategy that worked with the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (substitute monikers for colors), and is aimed at pretty much the same age range, so why not? It was only a matter of time when a Spice Girls movie was going to arrive on the scene, and just as inevitable that it would open itself up to criticism from those who were fast wearying of the group. Using the tried and true template of the Beatles' A HARD DAYS NIGHT, SPICE WORLD follows the misadventures of the five Spices and their harried manager as they prepare for a big show.
Having established a pretty basic formula, the next decision of the film-makers was to ward off the expected criticism of the girls' images and the likely transience of their fame by getting their own scripted potshots in first. The overall tone of the piece isn't self-deprecating enough to pull this off, although ironically the predictions of girls leaving the group, falling pregnant and failing to maintain the heights of their chart success did come true within a couple of years of the film's release. Instead we are left with the rather curious sight of the ‘real' Spice Girls playing the characters of the Spice Girls who are trying to break out of their media conceptions and into the ‘real' Spice Girls. In the long term, we're left with no more insight in their feature than one of their music videos, and those who have never seen the five performers before will be hard pressed to see what the fuss was about or even to differentiate them. As far as the film is concerned, one is a bit more ‘working class' than the others, one rolls her eyes a lot, one sucks a lollipop, one seems sulkily detached, and one has ginger hair. If you need to learn more, tune into the wonderful music trivia show POP-UP VIDEO.
SPICE WORLD is so dedicated to distracting attention from itself that it fabricates an abundance of subplots and throws in a huge number of cameos – the old tactic of endorsing a celebrity product by surrounding it with those who already have credibility (Jonathon King, Elvis Costello, Jools Holland and others). The camera is almost afraid to linger on any one member of the group, so the dialogue becomes a string of one-liners. Meanwhile, dance routines and songs drift in and out of the story, the Girls jump from one unrelated scene to the next and for a finale the film starts spoofing its own status as a vehicle for the group. By its very nature SPICE WORLD is consumed quickly and then forgotten. It's not a bad film (has anybody ever tried to watch that Pet Shop Boys movie more than once?), it's just that it was never possible for it to be particularly good.
As SPICE WORLD is primarily an exercise in promotion it would make criticism on cinematic grounds redundant (doubly so when you consider that its target audience of youngsters would not be the type to even read reviews) unless the purpose of the act was to be seen as providing a record of a cultural phenomenon. Will the 12-year old girls who saw this movie in 1997 be reading the reviews out of interest or nostalgia many years later? It looks as though even the Spice Girls read their demographic wrong: as the film's credits roll, Mel B stares into the camera lens and says decisively to the other members of the group that the audience is about to leave the cinema and go to the pub. Hardly.
sburridge@hotmail.com
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