Billy Elliot (Guardian review, 29 September 2000)
From somewhere on a spectrum between Kes and How Green Was My Valley, the British stage
director Stephen Daldry brings us Billy Elliot, his screen debut. This is a bold, attractive and
emotionally generous film about a young boy growing up in the north-east during the miners'
strike of 1984-85, who discovers in himself a talent for dance. And – to the horror of his striking
miner father, played by the perennially excellent Gary Lewis – this is not even the virile and
masculine dance of Gene Kelly. It is ballet: mincing, prancing, flouncing tutu-wearing ballet, and
young Billy (Jamie Bell) has to work on his pliés along with all the girlies in a church hall where
Dad sends him every week with his 50p sub in his hot little hand on the understanding that he is
learning how to box.
This is a film with a lot of charm, a lot of humour and a lot of heart. Daldry's direction and the
screenplay by Lee Hall (who wrote the radio drama hit Spoonface Steinberg) distinguish
themselves further in the discreet, intelligent way they deal with the question of Billy's nascent
sexuality, avoiding vulgarity and prurience. The young male ballet dancer is not a stereotype, and
yet the film certainly does not feel it necessary to reassure the audience that Billy is straight; for
my money, that's part of this picture's liberal humanity.
Billy finds himself in his embarrassing predicament when he is perpetually having the living
daylights knocked out of him in the ring, unhappily wearing the seedy old boxing gloves that
were once the property of his grandfather. Something in him responds to the sight of the ballet
class in the opposite corner. He joins in, coming under the wing of the teacher, Mrs Wilkinson,
played by Julie Walters, who in some ways is playing a version of the Michael Caine role in
Educating Rita. She sees that dance, with its soaring language of the human spirit, might be
Billy's ticket out of here.
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In Billy Elliot, dance is at once an expression of yearning, and a symptom of frustration; Mrs
Wilkinson is described as "unfulfilled - that's why she does dancing!" Julie Walters could so easily
have given an over-egged and gamey performance as the gutsy mentor, and it is a measure of
her intelligence as a performer and Daldry's assurance as a director, that her approach is kept
within bounds. There is a very good sequence where she and Billy do a dance routine that she
has devised for him to I Love to Boogie by T Rex: and this scene nicely complements a later
moment where Billy does his own dance of rage in the street when his Dad forbids him to dance
again.
It is a spontaneous choreography of frustration, which hovers between the world of realistic
drama and the stylised world of the musical. But the action of Billy Elliot deepens as his father, at
first infuriated, comes to accept his son's talent, and that some money must be found to enable
him to audition for the Royal Ballet School. With a terrible clarity, it dawns on him that this
means breaking the strike, and joining the cowering blacklegs who are bussed in through the
picket lines every morning.
So from questioning his ballet-loving son's masculinity, Billy's dad arrives at his own male crisis.
The use of the strike is very studied: the period of Billy's first timid dance steps to his fateful
audition covers the strike period almost exactly. By casting this momentous and traumatic event
in British history as a backdrop to a young boy's growing pains, Daldry is, arguably, open to the
charge of sentimentalising intractable political issues – and from a feminist perspective, there is
not much to cheer about in the story of a boy who turns out to be much better than all the girls,
and entirely monopolises his teacher's attention.
Occasionally, the background furniture is pedantic, and a little baffling. Along with T Rex, we
have a Ker-Plunk under Billy's bed and the inevitable Spacehopper – all shorthand for the 70s,
rather than the 80s. But the incidental details are sketched in with flair and wit: there's a nice
moment when Mrs Wilkinson's daughter Debbie is sauntering with Billy down the street and idly
bangs a stick along the row of policemen's riot shields, like railings. It couldn't happen in real life
- but it's such a funny and surreal moment, of a piece with Daldry's amiable and buoyant
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direction. Billy Elliot has a freshness that makes it a pleasure to watch; it's a very emphatic
success.
Billy Elliot musical axes dates in Hungary amid claims it could ‘turn
children gay’ (The Guardian, 22 June 2018)
The Hungarian State Opera House has cancelled 15 performances of the musical Billy Elliot after
ticket sales were hit by a media campaign in outlets close to Viktor Orbán’s “illiberal”
government that called the show a propaganda tool for homosexuality. “As you know, the
negative campaign in recent weeks against the Billy Elliot production led to a big drop in ticket
sales, and for this reason we are cancelling 15 performances in line with the decision of our
management,” the director-general of the opera house, Szilveszter Ókovács, told the
independent Hungarian website 444.hu.
The musical is based on the 2000 film of the same name, which tells the eponymous story of a
boy growing up in a depressed northern English mining town in the 1980s who eschews boxing
to pursue his passion for ballet. An op-ed in Magyar Idők newspaper on 1 June says the story
“could turn children gay”. The article also suggests the musical promotes a “deviant way of life”
that goes against the demographic needs of the country.
“The propagation of homosexuality cannot be a national goal when the population is getting
older and smaller and our country is threatened by invasion.” The article suggests that if Ókovács
could not remove certain scenes from the production, it should be pulled altogether. Writing in
Magyar Idők, Ókovács argued that “showing something which is an indisputable fact of life does
not mean you are propagating it. One can be gay and conservative at the same time.” He also
noted that the only gay character from the original script was not included in the Hungarian
production.
The Hungarian State Opera House has performed Billy Elliot 90 times to more than 100,000
people since 2016, but ticket prices for the remaining performances have since been halved.
Emboldened by his third consecutive election victory in April, Orbán has doubled down on his
plan to make Hungary an “illiberal state” by moving against judicial independence and non-
governmental organisations. He has also increased pressure on independent institutions
including the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Central European University. Another
rightwing paper with close links to Orbán, the Figyelő, published a list of researchers, accusing
them of working on “gay rights and gender science”.
Hungary’s parliament passed a series of laws this week that criminalise any individual or group
that offers to help an illegal immigrant claim asylum. The legislation restricts the ability of NGOs
to act in asylum cases and was passed in defiance of the EU and human rights groups. Under the
Stop Soros law, individuals or groups that help illegal migrants gain status to stay in Hungary will
be liable to prison terms. The Fidesz party’s re-election landslide followed a campaign attacking
the US billionaire George Soros and the liberal NGOs he supports. Orbán believes Soros has
encouraged mass immigration in order to undermine Europe. The author of the Magyar Idők
article, Zsófia Horváth, declined to respond to the Guardian’s questions about the piece.
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The Full Monty (Guardian review, 29 August 1997)
Considering its subject matter, The Full Monty comes across as an oddly innocent, sexless film.
It's a comedy about male full-frontal exposure, or, as one character puts it, men prancing around
Sheffield with their widgers hanging out. Rife with nudging and guffawing, Peter Cattaneo 's film
about steelworkers turned male strippers is somehow less raunchy, but every bit as jolly and as
irreducibly English, as a Donald McGill seaside postcard. Populated by awkward, well-meaning
lads who don't have it in them to behave too badly, its Sheffield is apparently the one part of
Britain that Loaded never reached.
What The Full Monty is, though, is political, in the gentlest, Ealing-comedy way. It starts with a
brassy, breathlessly chipper documentary clip, a spot-on parody of the old Pathe Films. The men
have nothing much else to occupy them, and Gaz is likely to lose touch with his young son unless
he can pay his debts. Then they see some women queuing to see a troupe of male strippers. Gaz,
realising there's only one way left for a man to make a fast buck, assembles a rival crew - not so
much beefcake as meatloaf and scrag end.
Unemployed Northern men trying anything to scrape a living and uphold their dignity sure
enough, The Full Monty pays its respects to Ken Loach. There's a cameo by Bruce Jones from
Loach's Raining Stones, as a hapless auditioner gauchely attempting to peel off his anorak. But
this is light Loach and with a more focused comic touch. What makes the story compelling is that
there's more at stake than just the few bob and laughs the lads stand to make. It's dignity they
hope to regain, and more fundamentally, masculinity. Fatigued and disenfranchised, they all
wonder if they're still men. Dave worries about losing his wife (Lesley Sharp), Gaz is already
divorced, and their suicidal pal Lomper (Steve Huison) is living a dreary celibate life.
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Meanwhile, Sheffield's women are still in work and ruling the roost. They've even taken over the
working men's club for women-only nights. A mortified Gaz sneaks behind enemy lines to
witness the ultimate horror - women not only invading the sanctity of the Gents, but pissing
standing up. The vision persuades him there's only one way for men to retaliate - reclaim their
widgers. The Full Monty could have been made as course material for film-studies seminars on
Marxism and the Phallus.
Cattaneo and Beaufoy could have gone for a harsher lampooning of male sexual attitudes, but
their approach yields subtler, more tender returns. Their heroes are adolescents who don't
understand women but wish they did, and eventually are only too happy to confess their
inadequacies. The presence of women in the film seems a little cursory, largely restricted to
Lesley Sharp, Emily Woof, a few mouthy passers-by, and the crowds of the club scenes. But
that's because the men see women from the outside - through the toilet window, as it were.
Excluded from the female world of adulthood, they form their own society, a Just William club of
eternal schoolboys with Gaz's young son Nathan (the engagingly sour-faced William Shape)
tagging along as disapproving chaperon.
This is something you rarely see a film on camaraderie among straight men (mostly), that doesn't
indulge in slobbishness or Californian hugs, but celebrates the virtues of solidarity. Widgers
United. The joke is that the men aren't really learning a new skill that will alter their lives. The
Full Monty feels celebratory because it isn't about changing the world, but about a ridiculous
dare. Their session is a lovely bit of satire Gaz's boys choose to perform dressed as security
guards, in the uniform of the most reviled, morally vacant growth profession of the nineties.
It's all feel-good fairy-tale, of course. If the ending doesn't quite ring true, neither does the world
it's set in. This Sheffield looks more like a cosy, dilapidated village than the wrecked metropolis
of the opening sequence. Everyone knows each other, meets at the job centre, and swaps pithy
badinage in the street. The visual matter-of-factness is offset by rare comic efficiency. There isn't
a scene that's not absolutely to the point, and its daftest gags - even the Donna Summer routine
in the Giro queue - are beautifully understated.
The actors seem to thrive on the team spirit there are great cartoonish turns from all including
the lugubrious Paul Barber. Mark Addy is memorable as big-hearted Dave. Carlyle, a gristly
streak of nervous energy, pulls off near-impossible scenes of tender awkwardness with his
estranged son. Most impressive of all is Tom Wilkinson's ex-foreman, swinging subtly from
pompous denial to saucy abandon. The Full Monty is a prime example of another once-thriving
national product that you thought had gone the way of steel. It's the best British sitcom in years.
