Nasty Neighbours
UK 2000
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Harold and Jean Peach live in one half of a semi-detached house in a suburban cul-de-sac. After their friendly neighbours, the Hodges, leave for Australia, the Peaches are appalled when a brash young couple, Robert and Ellen Chapman, move in. Robert rejects Harold's attempts at being neighbourly, and the two men are soon engaged in rivalry which culminates in Harold scratching profanities on the bonnet of Robert's roadster.
Harold, an inept double-glazing salesman, is getting deeper into debt and mortgage arrears which he conceals from his wife. Jean drinks heavily, losing herself in memories of Spanish holidays with the Hodges. Harold becomes obsessed with Ellen; he takes to following her and drills a peephole into the Chapmans' bedroom. Sacked from his job, he vainly tries to raise money to market his invention, an all-in-one hat and scarf. Bailiffs arrive to take the Peaches' furniture.
Robert accidentally damages Harold's prize pansies; Harold attacks him and is beaten up. Building-society officials come to repossess the house. Harold barricades himself and Jean inside, dons military uniform and raises a Union Jack on the roof. At night he breaks into the Chapmans' house and holds them at gunpoint. Robert gets possession of the gun and shoots Harold dead. Jean sets up a thriving business making all-in-one hat-and-scarf sets.
Review
"My pink half of the drainpipe, I may paint it blue, my pink half of the drainpipe keeps me safe from YOU," sang Viv Stanshall venomously back in 1968. With the government poised to legislate on the burning issue of intrusive leylandii trees (not to mention television voyeur-fests such as Neighbours from Hell), the feuds and sporadic violence that lurk behind the lace curtains of British suburbia are no new topic. So in describing writer-director Debbie Isitt's screen debut as "fiercely original", the production notes of Nasty Neighbours are maybe taking puffery a little too far.
Nor does Isitt, scripting from her own stage play, take her material anywhere very unexpected. From the moment the Chapmans, exuding sex and arrogance, move in next door to the fuddy-duddy Peaches, the course of events isn't too hard to predict. Characters and incidents are strictly from stock, and pretty dated stock at that. Aggressive young Jack-the-Lad with flash car and sexy wife; tubby middle-aged loser with dull job, lusting after attractive woman next door; sexually frustrated wife hitting the bottle amid mantilla'd dolls from the Costa Brava - we're not far from the Donald McGill world of the saucy postcard. This oddly dated jokiness extends even to the props. When Harold dons military uniform to mount his roof-top protest he's wearing the tin hat of an ARP warden, which by any calculation would make him at least 80 years old.
If the film remains watchable and diverting, it's chiefly down to the cast. Ricky Tomlinson, exploring the downside of his couch-potato patriarch in television's The Royle Family, brings out the pathos behind Harold's blustering bonhomie ("Peach is in reach," he informs the incredulous Robert by way of neighbourly welcome), and he has a wonderfully lugubrious moment when, apparently invited in to clinch a double-glazing contract, he finds himself instead a guest at the prospective client's wake. As his wife, drowning her desperation in paso doble records and cheap sherry, Marion Bailey makes Jean more painful than laughable, and there's a fine portrayal of greasy malevolence from Hywel Bennett as Harold's boss, his face shining with gratified spite.
The action of Nasty Neighbours is periodically interrupted by mock-documentary passages: black-and-white talking-head shots in which, questioned by an unseen interlocutor, all the main characters except Harold justify their behaviour. This serves to underline the overall theme of lack of communication, with everybody verbalising away in his or her own little box, though the film would have worked just as well without this device. The same goes for the colour-distorted dream sequences of Harold strolling on an idyllic Antipodean beach, for which footage was shot in Australia. These sequences feel like anxious attempts to open out a play whose strength was precisely its sense of obsessive hot-house claustrophobia.
Credits
- Director
- Debbie Isitt
- Producer
- Christine Alderson
- Screenplay
- Debbie Isitt
- Based on her own play
- Directors of Photography
- Simon Reeves
- Sam McCurdy
- Editor
- Nicky Ager
- Production Designer
- Tim Streater
- Music
- Jocelyn Pook
- ©Ipso Facto Films
- Production Companies
- Ipso Facto Films presents in association with Glenrinnes Film Partnership & MPCE
- With financial support from Birmingham City Council (Economic Development
- Department) and West Midlands Arts and Northern Production Fund and Northern
- Arts and The European Community (European Regional Development Fund)
- Executive Producers
- Adam Page
- Nadine Marsh Edwards
- Terje Gaustad
- Lukas Erni
- Associate Producers
- Gary Tanner
- Tim Webb
- David Naden
- Production Managers
- Steve Bowden
- Australia Crew:
- Carolyn Johnson
- Location Manager
- Andrew Cooke
- Post-production Supervisor
- Jackie Vance
- 2nd Unit Director
- Australia Crew:
- Gary Tanner
- Assistant Directors
- Steve Robinson
- Ian Barber
- Annabel Merritt
- Robert Jagger
- Script Supervisors
- Nichol Hoye
- Grace McCarthy
- Casting Director
- Helen Collard
- Director of Photography
- Australia Crew:
- Damon Escott
- Digital Effects
- Mill Film Ltd (London)
- Scanning/Recording
- Pete Williams
- Cinesite (Europe) Ltd
- Special Effects Supervisor
- Alan Wibley
- Art Director
- Jo Newberry
- Costume Designer
- Sally Plum
- Costume Supervisor
- Russell Barnett
- Chief Hair/Make-up
- Sarah Wilson
- Make-up Artist
- Sarah Johnson
- Make-up/Hair
- Australia Crew:
- Vanessa Eisenberg
- Conor O'Sullivan
- Stuart Sewell
- Jeremy King
- Opticals/Titles
- Ray Slater
- Titles/Credits
- Soho Images
- Recording Mixer
- Tim Hodge
- Re-recording Mixers
- Alan Sallabank
- David Humphries
- Robert Thompson
- Sound Editor
- Andy Ludbrook
- Foley
- Artists:
- John Fewell
- Julie Ankerson
- Mixer:
- Trevor Swanscott
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Mark Lisbon
- Cast
- Ricky Tomlinson
- Harold Peach
- Marion Bailey
- Jean Peach
- Phil Daniels
- Robert Chapman
- Rachel Fielding
- Ellen Chapman
- Hywel Bennett
- the boss
- Dawn Butler
- travel agent
- Nick Whitfield
- estate agent
- Gordon Coulson
- Stan
- Freda Barratt
- Mrs Haygarth
- Agnes O'Dwyer
- woman mourner
- Geoff Dixon
- postman
- Merlyn Rice
- babysitter
- Catrina McHugh
- mother in doorway
- Vinnie McHugh
- child in doorway
- Kenneth Hadley
- bank manager
- John Statham
- Peter Isitt
- bailiffs
- Lucy Richardson
- posh woman
- Alan Holloway
- drug dealer
- Jacinta Nardoni
- prostitute
- Trevor Byfield
- car salesman
- Jayne Lloyd
- dinner lady
- Debbie Isitt
- Pauline Peach
- Gregor Trutter
- mortgage adviser
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Redbus Film Distribution
- 7,940 feet
- 88 minutes 13 seconds
- Dolby Digital
- Colour/Prints by
- Soho Images