Clapham Junction (2007)

Sadly Over-hyped

hyped garbage

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This movie tells the story of what happens one week to a number of gay men in and around Clapham Junction, a well-known gay cruising area in London.The characters include various gay men who visit the park, including a gay couple, two or three closeted married men, a teenage musician, an amoral park lothario, a basher and his victims. The movie captures the excitement and danger of park cruising, but without showing the eroticism. Gay bashing is a major part of the plot.In one narrative, we follow sexy but tortured Tim, a suspected pedophile, as he is seduced by 14-year-old Theo. There is no doubt who is the aggressor. Tim, who apparently likes them young, is helpless. (I agree with the other reviewers that this scene is powerful and erotically charged. However, it would have been more disturbingly realistic if the actor playing Theo actually did look 14. He looks more like 19. This robbed the scene of its shock value.) However, in the end, Tim must face the acidic wrath of a demented mother who knows nothing about her son, and perhaps does not wish to.All these characters are neatly linked, and not just by the geography.The final scene shows the musician's smashed violin, complete with sad music. I get it. Clapham Junction is not a happy place. Cruising in a park is double plus ungood, and not just because of the violence. Gay men are victims. Resist temptation at all costs. The picture this movie paints is a dark one. A stereotypical one. We are living in a world of hysterical mothers, gay bashers lurking in the bushes, and desperate gay men with unacceptable urges.Yes, these are stories that should be told, I suppose, but...surely there are also a few happy gay stories in and around Clapham Junction? The movie feeds on the stereotype of gay men as unhappy creatures leading pathetic lives. Sorry, but it's not realistic, is it?

An amazing film by the violence it contains. It is both realistic and frightening.Gay people, young and old, are forced to live a clandestine life with an underground satisfaction of their desires or impulses. They have against them three types of people. The parents, in this case essentially a mother, who cannot understand that at age 14 her son can have some desires and can try to get them satisfied. She is a bigot. If he would look for girls she would just be satisfied but not for boys, what's more men.The second type of enemies are gangs of gay hunters or in fact hunters of anything that is different and one of their victims is a gay waiter who is just walking home through a common park. He will be beaten to death. Another one is an Asian young teenager who is playing the violin and preparing for some Royal Academy of Music. We only see at the end the smashed violin in some underpass.The third type of enemies is more vicious because it does not even have the excuse of gang rule. It is purely individualistic isolated gay-bashers who go around, let one flirt with them and then trap him in a way or another and smash him to death. The film has one moment of extremely morbid humor here since one of these predators meet with another of these predators and one will end up in hospital.Gay men seem to have one more enemy which is among themselves this time. It is unfaithfulness. One couple gets their civil partnership celebrated and while everyone is having fun, the older groom flirts with the waiter in the pantry in the basement of the house. Pretty ugly for that predator of another type, a predator who only has one objective: have his way with as many gay men as possible while his civil union gives him some kind of cover up for his feline treacherous behavior.That is sordid, bleak, and even morbid in a way. And yet there may be some hope in all that darkness. The hope of maybe some might start feeling differently about it, feeling that all men have the same right to love those they want and want to be loved and to love back. The hope that one closeted gay man might do the right thing and help the police catch the killers who took the life of the waiter. And eventually the second groom of the "married" couple coming across the ring he gave his partner on the finger of one of the solitary gay-bashers who got beaten up by the other solitary gay-basher understands that his own partner has given his ring to someone and this ring ended up on the finger of someone who was not at the wedding ceremony or celebration. The police will sort out the rest. That's the hope, but wrapped up in so much muck.The film is supposed to be based on true facts and to have been shot to help develop a debate in our societies. It sure brings up many questions and no easy answer because you can change the law, you can change the police, you can change courts and judges, but to change the mentality and minds of bigots and hunters hunting human preys for the fun of catching, torturing and then killing those who are dressed to kill in a way and yet are killed by those who are just by-standers who should have let life live the way it wanted to be lived.Such crimes might finally get down in number and gravity when everyone will have the same rights and the law gives everyone the same dignity and freedom. But it will be long and difficult. Bigotry is alas very well and widely spread and we have not invented yet the bigotry-collecting trucks and machines to get it to the closest bigotry dump.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

The problem with Kevin Elyot's (writer) and Adrian Shergold's (director) boldly ambitious "Clapham Junction" is that it attempts to bite off so much more than it can possibly chew in just under two hours. Elyot goes for an epic structure in an intimate setting. At times it looks like he's trying to cram in forty years of gay sexual history into a night and day and it just doesn't work. I wish I could have liked it more because there is so much here to admire and spread over, maybe six weekly episodes, he might have got away with it but as it stands it just doesn't ring true. This may well be down to Elyot's reliance on coincidence. All the characters seem to be inter-related. Nothing wrong with that, you might say; it has worked as a backdrop to many splendid dramas in the past but you have to suspend quite a lot of disbelief when in a city the size of London with a sizeable gay population, all the gay characters keep bumping into each other in clubs, public toilets, on Clapham Common itself or at dinner parties or just in living across the street from each other. It's a banal plot device and you can't help feeling Elyot would have made his point a lot better if the stories hadn't been connected.Nor is Elyot particularly good at serving up dialogue that sounds believable or naturalistic. The characters either talk in sound-bites or are reduced to double-entendres. If he can get in a crass joke, he does and nobody comes out of it well. But at least he tries. There is hardly an aspect of gay life, (or of 'straight' society's reaction to it), that he leaves unexplored. He even gives us the self-loathing bit of gay trade who beats up his pick-up for the night, (and later gets beaten up himself), and the film's most successful story is the one between the pedophile and the fourteen year old boy who worships him, (this only let down by casting a twenty-three year old actor as the boy).It is also very unevenly acted. There may be an in-joke of sorts in casting James Wilby and Rupert Graves, (the lovers from "Maurice"), Wilby as a closeted married man and Graves as an out and aging queen he eyes up in a toilet and later meets at a dinner party. Perhaps if these parts had been better written neither actor would have looked so foolish. The best performances come from Jospeh Mawle and Luke Tredaway as the pedophile and the boy and it's very much to their credit that they lift a very difficult subject and make it moving and oddly romantic. Detractors will, of course, find this story the most objectionable for obvious reasons although the producers have cushioned the blow by casting the obviously older Tredaway as the boy.The film itself takes as its basis the real-life murder of Jody Dobrowski on Clapham Common in 2005 but the impact is weakened by the episodic structure. Ultimately "Clapham Junction" is neither fish nor fowl but an unwieldy hybrid. Its heart may be in the right place but you can't help but feel it does its subject, (whatever you take its subject to be), something of an injustice.

A truly brilliant piece of work. The writing is creative, astute and exceptionally well crafted. The direction creates exactly the right mood for the story and brings out the best in the writing and the acting. The actors play each character so perfectly right from the beginning that you truly believe them - exactly what should happen! The story is not for the faint hearted and though explicit, it is never gratuitous. The story is written to challenge you and it does so superbly. Whether you like the content or not, you can't say it isn't a good piece of work. It makes you think and it makes you feel - and you can't ask for more than that.