If the generational chasm exposed by last week’s election came as shock, you clearly haven’t been watching British movies. Young people have a raw enough deal already – austerity, student debt, unaffordable housing, Ed Sheeran – but British cinema has been rubbing their noses in it for a while, serving them grim tales of broken families and criminal career paths, from ’hood dramas like Kidulthood and Ill Manors to arthouse downers like Fish Tank and last month’s The Levelling, in which a Somerset teen puts her studies on hold to come and clear out the family stables – literally and metaphorically. That’s what you’ve got to look forward to, kids!
For the seniors, it’s a different story in a different postcode. While the kids are fighting for survival on council estates, the oldies get twinkly romcoms like this week’s Hampstead, set in London’s leafy exclusion zone of poshness. It’s been described as “Notting Hill for silver surfers”, with respectable, widowed Diane Keaton taking in local oddball Brendan Gleeson, who lives in the type of squatter shack that real homeless people can only dream of, and scrubs up to middle-class acceptability rather nicely.
The postwar generation that “never had it so good” are still having it pretty good. In their youth, they were spoilt for choice by British cinema; now they’re getting 50 shades of grey wish-fulfilment, forever giving them second chances and late-life adventures. They’re raising hell in their colourful retirement communities (Quartet, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel). They’re doing crimes (Golden Years, The Love Punch). They’re leching over younger women (Youth, Venus, Mr Morgan’s Last Love). And they’re falling in love again, like Keaton and Gleeson, or Helen Mirren and Om Puri in The Hundred Foot Journey, or Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson in Last Chance Harvey (“It’s never too late to change your life,” ran that movie’s tagline). Judi Dench probably has a tattoo of that.
You can’t blame the old. With their generous pension funds and plentiful free time, they’ve fuelled their own grey-cinema boom – and good for them. But if silver surfers can have their Notting Hill, can’t British cinema at least muster a few more movies that celebrate being young?
There is clearly an appetite. The second- and third-highest grossing solely British movies of all time are The Inbetweeners Movie and its sequel, where teen characters got to go abroad, get messy, get laid, and get into trouble, just like their grandparents. If the youth vote got it together, it could change the face of British cinema. First we take Hampstead, then we take Notting Hill!
Hampstead is in cinemas from 23 June
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