Elephant Juice
USA/UK 1999
Reviewed by Christopher Hawkes
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
London, the present. Seven friends discuss relationships over dinner. Jules announces her engagement to her artist boyfriend Will. Daphne, Jules' best friend, is dating Frank, and Graham is together with George, a model. The couples decide to find Billy, who's single, a partner.
After a botched blind date and aborted visit to a prostitute, Billy begins a relationship with Dodie, a young American working as a waitress. Frank pursues Daphne and the couple eventually sleep together. Jules expresses doubts to Billy about her engagement.
Both Daphne and Jules become pregnant, but Daphne refuses to confirm Frank is the father. Dodie returns to America without warning, and Jules discovers that Will is visiting prostitutes. George leaves Graham when his modelling career takes off. Daphne has a miscarriage after a suicide attempt, and the friends convene at the hospital. Will, after being rejected by both Daphne (who was carrying his child) and Jules, leaves. Jules flees the hospital, and Billy, realising his true feelings, gives chase. Later, the friends gather at a party. Daphne and Frank confirm their love for each other, as do Jules and Billy.
Review
Writer Amy Jenkins is perhaps best known for creating This Life, one of the most popular British television series of the 90s. Directed by Sam Miller, who worked on This Life, Elephant Juice, which Jenkins wrote, invites comparisons with the BBC2 drama. But while both deal with the tribulations of a group of professional Londoners, Elephant Juice is almost wholly centred on its characters' troubled relationships. Resorting to consumerist similes to describe their love lives ("He was like a car I couldn't park"), the seven friends at the heart of Elephant Juice compare and contrast the relationships they're in without making any commitment; they face an excess of choice (represented by the bewildering variations waitress Dodie offers Billy when he asks for a coffee) which distracts them from emotional fulfilment. In this sense Elephant Juice is more closely related to Jenkins' recent novel Honeymoon. Just as its heroine Honey is seduced away from her husband by the reappearance of a one-night stand, here Billy would rather mouth "elephant juice" (which when lip-read looks like "I love you") than face up to his emotional needs.
Miller hints at the sense of disaffection underlying his protagonists' lifestyles: the nightclub that Daphne attends is airless and deafening, and when Billy and Jules meet for a salsa class, the overhead positioning of the camera makes their movements appear joyless and mechanical. The episodic intertitles ("Do you want what you cannot have?") and recurrent dinner-party debates underscore the sombre, questioning drift of Jenkins' screenplay.
But there's a portentous stiffness about these intertitles, too, one which afflicts the rest of the film. Crowded with thinly developed characters, Elephant Juice is often as clumsy as the mammal itself. The most interesting relationships in the film are those between Jules and her two "little boys" (Will, the errant fiancé, and Billy, the bumbling romantic), and the most effective scenes contain these characters - Jules in the subway, isolated from the crowds by a plane of extreme shallow focus, being drawn to the platform's edge; and Billy, waiting for Will in the kitchen of the brothel they visit, vacillating between righteousness and self-disgust. These sequences, thoughtful, almost wordless, lend the characters a depth unseen elsewhere. But the resonances of such moments are lost among the rhubarb of the surrounding voices and plot progressions. The film's finale sees Daphne, thus far likeably sassy, attempt suicide and miscarry her child, an unconvincing plot device which prompts Will's ejection from the group and cements Billy's relationship with Jules. With this hasty happy-ever-after ending, which ties up loose narrative threads but lacks emotional bite, the film is ironically true to its name: it appears to be saying something important while in fact is saying hardly anything at all.
Credits
- Director
- Sam Miller
- Producers
- Sheila Fraser Milne
- Amy Jenkins
- Sam Miller
- Screenplay
- Amy Jenkins
- Based on an idea by
- Amy Jenkins
- Sam Miller
- Director of Photography
- Adrian Wild
- Editor
- Elen Pierce Lewis
- Production Designer
- Grant Hicks
- Music
- Tim Atack
- Production Companies
- Miramax Films in association with Film Four presents a HAL Films production
- A Miramax/HAL Films production
- Executive Producers
- David Aukin
- Trea Hoving
- Colin Leventhal
- Associate Producer
- Allon Reich
- Executive in Charge of Production
- Sara Geater
- Production Co-ordinators
- Amanda Doig-Moore
- Miramax/HAL:
- Laura Madden
- Production Manager
- Bi Benton
- Unit Manager
- Piers Dunn
- Location Manager
- David Kennaway
- Post-production Supervisor
- Stephen Barker
- Assistant Directors
- Richard Whelan
- Sara Desmond
- Emma Griffiths
- Script Supervisor
- Emma Thomas
- Casting
- Di Carling
- US:
- Kerry Barden
- Script Executive
- Miramax/HAL Films:
- Christian Colson
- 2nd Unit Director of Photography/Operator
- Alastair Meux
- Camera Operators
- Alan Stewart
- 2nd Unit:
- Paul Bernard
- Steadicam Operators
- Alf Tramontin
- Jan Pester
- Special Effects Supervisors
- John Markwell
- Stuart Brisdon
- Supervising Art Director
- Philip Harvey
- Art Director
- Teresa Weston
- Set Decorator
- Neesh Rubin
- Metal Sculptures
- Terry Slater
- Costume Designer
- Jill Taylor
- Wardrobe Master
- Giles Gate
- Hair/Make-up
- Designer:
- Christina Baker
- Artist:
- Philippa Hall
- Make-up Artist
- Rebecca Walker
- Title Sequence
- Kemistry
- Film Opticals
- Cine Image Film Opticals, Ltd
- Music Supervisor
- Bob Last
- Music Co-ordinator
- Heather Bownass
- Music Editors
- Dominic Gibbs
- Graham Sutton
- Music Researcher
- Julian Bates
- Soundtrack
- "Ordinary Joe" - Terry Callier; "El pueblo pide que toque" - Roberto Roena; "Tu musica popular" - Gilbero Santa Rosa; "Filtered Funk" Waiwan; "Push the Button" - Money Mark; "Jason King Theme" - the Laurie Johnson Orchestra; "Everything Must Go (Chemical Brothers remix)" - Manic Street Preachers; "Here's That Rainy Day" - Chet Baker; "Feeling Called Love" - Wire; "La Guitaristic House Organisation" - Rinocerose; "NGC 224" - Mukta; "Red Alert"
- - Basement Jaxx, contains a sample from "Far Beyond" - Locksmith; "Air" - Vegas Soul; "Daydream" - Henry Mancini; "Little Green Apples" - Monk Higgins; "Hum" - Superstar; "Something for Cat"; "Every Single Day"; "I'm Not in Love"
- Production Sound Mixer
- Peter Baldock
- Re-recording Mixers
- Robin O'Donoghue
- Dominic Lester
- Dialogue Editor
- Gillian Dodders
- Effects Editor
- Simon Price
- Foley
- Artists:
- Andie Derrick
- Peter Burgis
- Editor:
- Brian Freemantle
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Nick Powell
- Cast
- Emmanuelle Béart
- Jules
- Sean Gallagher
- Billy
- Daniel LaPaine
- Will
- Daniela Nardini
- Daphne
- Mark Strong
- Frank
- Kimberly Williams
- Dodie
- Lennie James
- Graham
- Lee Williams
- George
- Kate Gartside
- Kathy
- Rebecca Palmer
- Aileen
- James Thornton
- Rock
- Sabra Williams
- Janet
- Gary Sefton
- boy in supermarket
- Amelia Lowdell
- girl in supermarket
- Sharon Bower
- restaurant woman
- Brian Hickey
- restaurant man
- Akemi Otani
- tai-chi young woman
- Elder Sanchez
- dance teacher
- Tim Harris
- young man
- Vanessa Robinson
- policewoman
- Evelyn Doggart
- tall blond
- Fiona Spreadborough
- short blond
- Rob Jarvis
- boorish man
- Bruce Barnden
- tall blond's husband
- Janine Wood
- woman in clinic
- Alan Williams
- geezer-man on tube
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Metrodome Distribution Ltd
- 7,899 feet
- 87 minutes 46 seconds
- Dolby
- In Colour
- 2.35:1 [Super35]