POSTCARDS FROM LONDON is stylish, smart and sexy.  It is also garish … but never Gaudi. The topic, you see, is art.  Paintings and literature and desire. With every frame a frameable image and beauty abounding in the environments and in the characters and in the matters to hand, this is a film to adorate.  Unless you are Jim, a country boy from Essex, drawn to London, who lands in a Soho of Director/Writer Steve McLean’s imagination.  A world which belongs to “writers, queers and whores”.

Jim will begin a life of sex work that is just right for a pretty, polite, eager to learn young man blessed with a passion for appreciating art and a nascent intellect.  Falling in with ‘The Raconteurs’, who are short their fifth member in mysterious circumstances, he will be schooled in post-coital conversation and musery. “intellectual debate – inspired and uplifting” Thus begins his escorted journey which will lead him to embrace both the arts and arts lovers.  Unfortunately he feels distinctly unwell around masterworks and is afflicted with a definite tendency towards inserting himself. 

Harris Dickinson will endow Jim with a dramatic growth into a full fledged raconteur state from a naïve young man who is told by a barmaid to toughen up and who disputes paying £10 to sleep overnight in a cardboard box.  He speaks to the camera on occasion and is spirited off to remembered or imagined worlds with ease.  His meeting with the sexy cabal of boys is one of the highlights of the film, as much for the trip into their presence as for the explanation of what they do.   Jim wanders through freeze frames of sailor dressed beautiful people on the way.

It is the filmmaking that is the real star of POSTCARDS FROM LONDON.  The characters are engaging, the story interesting, if a titch too protracted, but the way the film looks is gorgeous.  It re-creates several Caravaggios in a chiaroscuro that is constantly referenced inside the neon glare and darkness of alternative vice in the shadows of a postmodern Soho.  Other influences also compete for prominence in McLean’s vision and it’s a referential motley for an art or film buff.  Jim will encounter a doctor who holds his hand to tell his future.  There is avarice and vulgarity outside the circle and an intensity of unconventional choices inside.  There’s even a dance at the end and the post-film titles are beyond surprising.

The music in the film also hits dark and light.  Sometimes with a pulse and thump in contrast and concert with events but often with a recognisability that soothes and engages.  There is a superb scene lit in red and blue on skin and sex with ‘Funny Valentine’ slow and mellow on guitar behind. Delicious.

And so are the men.  And the costuming.  Stunningly conceived for detail and fabric and accessories and character, they are just to die for.  Especially subtle is Jim’s gradually educated evolution into his own personal style.  His early choices are made for him as the cardsharps style him with fruit for the postcards which will appear in telephone boxes advertising his services.   Like every object in the film, these are exquisitely detailed postcards and phone boxes in the signature glare of discreetly placed purple and pink neon.

POSTCARDS FROM LONDON has had its share of detractors but I really enjoyed my immersion in some divine decadence.  It is a film where the corporeal is elevated to cerebral, where the shape is theatrical, where the characters are self-aware, greedy aesthetes and the story is unpredictably captivating.  Another perfect pick for Queer Screen’s Mardi Gras Film Festival.

Find out more about POSTCARDS FROM LONDON at the official site or see the trailer on YouTube.

Queer Screen’s Mardi Gras FF runs February 13-28 and POSTCARDS FROM LONDON screens Fri Feb 15,  8:30 pm at Event Cinemas George St.