Sliding Doors: a realistic portrayal of London?
Don't you hate films set in an area you know well? All you can see are the mistakes, the inaccuracies, the omissions. Seeing your local main drag in a film is like seeing a football or boxing scene on the big screen: you can see what is being represented, but it's nothing like it would be in real life.
I find London-set films virtually unbearable. It's not the procession of tourist set-pieces in the background, so much as the wholly avoidable errors that set me on edge and blind me to any other merits the movie might have. This Year's Love, for example, was destroyed for me by the ending -- when a character hails a cab from Camden Town, in north London, to go to Gatwick Airport.
Here's where I get anal: what the character should be doing is hailing a cab on the southbound side of Chalk Farm Road, to go south and east, towards the Thames crossing at the Blackwall Tunnel, from where it's a simple run of A2, M20, M25, M23 (I said I would be getting anal). Instead, they get a cab going northwards, up Haverstock Hill, and disappear in the general direction of Luton.
Or take Sliding Doors, in which the John Hannah character runs from Primrose Hill in north London (from the street in which my wife used to live) to a restaurant in the centre of London. It's maybe two miles. He arrives at the restaurant without any visible sign of loss of breath or having broken sweat.
In this week's Film&Music, writers based around the world ponder the relationship between the cities they live in and the films set in those places. And we'd like to know whether the places you've lived have been given a fair crack on screen. Have they got the culture right? Are there errors of geography of the kind that drive me mad? Tell us the successes and the failures, wherever in the world you might be.
