The Boy Friend

comrade_yui5.0

this is a musical specifically designed to give an enormous headache to people who hate musicals and i absolutely respect its dedication to being extremely annoying and exhausting to watch

sarah squirm4.0

need to watch 800000000 eye makeup tutorial videos after thismovie magic!!!

theriverjordan3.5

“The Boy Friend” is a musical dream that unfolds in an inescapable horror of a theatrical nightmare. Director Ken Russell is better known for his mind bending thrillers, “The Devils” and “Altered States,” so it’s with particular expertise that he brings his talents to a genre that never asked for them: musical comedy. The first foray into a leading film role by recently retired supermodel Twiggy, “Boy Friend” is a loving pastiche of 20s theatre and Busby Berkeley. The aggressiveness with which its chorines in cloche hats are resurrected, though, is downright hostile. A classic tale of a homely extra who subs for the lead and makes the big time, the movie plays out entirely in a theatre; largely, inside a show inside that theatre. Abetted by this locational claustrophobia, “Boy Friend” is at times so abrasive in its cultivated falseness of camera angles and lighting, that it would make even Bertolt Brecht say, “Take a breather.”There’s little distinction between what is real and false; onstage or off. It’s a sort of misleading expected from the likes of Fincher or Hitchcock. But when it unfolds amidst dancers dressed like fairy cap mushrooms… it’s a dizzying sort of dissonance. The contrast between violent presentation and tender pastiche make “Boy Friend” unidentifiable and neigh unapproachable. Russell creates Busby Berkeley-inspired images in certain segments of the film that have also the mystical enchantment of style shown by the likes of Ziegfeld and Méliès. But then, he proceeds to film these moments as if they were a murder scene in “Clockwork Orange.” For this, all credit must go to Russell, for having the gumption if not the insanity to transform even Tommy Tune into a type of demon, tap dancing through a special type of hell: one where the showtimes never stop playing.