Jump, Darling was already released in Canada, but look for it to hit PVOD in the UK and US sometime soon. RIP Cloris Leachman and thank you for leaving us with this fantastic film. With mixed reviews from your Boys On Film judys, Jump, Darling may not be for everyone, but if you’re a gay boy who deeply loves his grandma, this film will certainly tug on your heartstrings – especially if you love a good Robyn moment in film. With an incredible pop soundtrack and touching performances, Jump, Darling highlights the relationship with a drag queen and his sometimes grouchy, but endearing grandmother. Jump, Darling is a lovely gay film set to the soundtrack of Robyn, Allie X, Years and Years, Scissor Sisters and London Grammar In this Boys On Film review, Phil, Raj and Sean take on the opening night film – Jump, Darling starring the late Cloris Leachman and Thomas Duplessie.įrom IMDB: A rookie drag queen, reeling from a break-up, escapes to the country, where he finds his grandmother in steep decline yet desperate to avoid the local nursing home. Obelisks represent solar rays that were symbolically petrified, and the one at the kerb should be pointing its chiselled tip at her.BFI Flare always brings us the best in LGBTQ+ film and this year’s online film festival certainly delivered. But for me, Christie's shock of hair is as golden as the afternoon sun, her blazer dazzlingly candy-striped: in a black and white world, she radiates colour. The overdressed frumps still plod through the dowdy, monochrome 1950s. She bites her lip to signal a delicious, teasing indecision Bogarde's bristling quiff alerts us to the urgency of his whispered appeal. Wearing a schoolboy's cap at a rakish angle while exhibiting – if you look very closely – a stocking top that marks the border beyond which the eye can't trespass, she also bestraddles the sexes. Despite the Op Art glasses and the winklepicker shoes, Christie transcends fashion. The photograph, however, is not satirical. Almost 50 years later, the fable about vacuous, ephemeral celebrity remains tartly relevant.
The character played by Julie Christie in Darling is a go-getting model and sexual careerist Dirk Bogarde is the television journalist who tracks her social rise. For her it will always be 1965, and she will always – thanks to John Schlesinger's film – be beautiful. But the figure sitting down on the pavement, with a suppliant crouching beside her, is exempt from the flow she has parked herself in a deckchair as if she were at the beach, not in a harried place of transit. The sun is behind all these people, and the shadows cast by bodies, slanting trees and the upright lamp-post are long. Time, like this north London thoroughfare, is a one-way street. The old women are dressed for wintry old age this sprightly pair – both with sunglasses, he with no tie and carrying a jacket he doesn't need – bask in the springtime of the body. She, idly dangling her bag from her hand rather than holding it protectively in front of her, wears a dress that could be by Mary Quant with a collar that makes her look like a sunflower.
The young couple holding hands belong in a later, more relaxed era. The passing matrons could be Edwardian, wearing a genteel uniform – funereal hat and oppressively long coat, gloved hands and festoons of pearls round the neck – for a promenade to the shops. The water fountain, propped on a pedestal and topped by an officious obelisk, is a relic of Victorian philanthropy, catering to the thirst of the itinerant poor. This one ranges across two centuries before settling on one charmed decade. P hotographs are time capsules, histories that compress information about more than the single moment when the shutter blinked.