LAURIE SPARHAM (2)

Cut, set and style

April 20, 2001

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

Rachel Griffiths, Natasha Richardson and Alan Rickman

'Full Monty' writer's latest film is set in the world of hairdressing

by Kaizaad Kotwal

From the writer of the surprise hit The Full Monty comes a new film about the cutthroat world of you guessed it-hair dressing. Blow Dry is a small yet precious film that uses the British National Hair Dressing Championship as a backdrop to assess the role of family and the value of reconciliation in the face of impending tragedy.

Oscar-nominated screenwriter Simon Beaufoy brings to bear some of the same

Josh Hartnett

strengths of comedy and drama as he did in The Full Monty to Blow Dry. Beaufoy explores the world of clipping and coifing, using it as a rather flashy canvas against which to paint a really intimate story about a family trying to find its original magic in the direct stare of a mother dying of cancer.

The Allen family is the unit at the center of this sweetly comic and poignantly dramatic film. These are regular people, living in the small town of Keighley in Yorkshire in Northern England, where the British National Hair Dressing Championships are to be held.

In The Full Monty, Beaufoy turned a group of overweight, underpaid and misunderstood steelworkers into the hottest male burlesque act in all of England.

In Blow Dry, he uses the same conceit to test the waters of what it means to be family in a topsy-turvy world. Like most of the successful British films of the past decade or so, like Beautiful Thing, Saving Ned Devine, Saving Grace, and most recently, the amazing Billy Elliot, Blow Dry is also set against the bucolic charms of small-town England where issues of class and familial bonds are always strong in

The Allen family patriarch is Phil, Keighley's local barber and a single dad who is teaching his son Brian the tricks of the trade. Phil used to be one of the greatest hairdressing champions. However, ten years earlier, Phil abandoned his sparkling creativity when his wife ran off with their gorgeous hairdressing model on the eve of the championships.

In The Full Monty, one of the surprising elements of the films came when two of the male strippers ended up falling in love with each other. In Blow Dry, Beaufoy turns his gaze on a lesbian relationship. Phil's wife Shelley lives in the same town with her girlfriend Sandra and together they run a salon named "A Cut Above."

Shelley's recurring cancer is back and the prognosis is grim. She decides to keep the new cancer a secret from Sandra, while Phil and her son Brian have never known that under that bobbing blonde hair lies a scalp ravaged by chemotherapy.

Shelley realizes, when the competition comes to town, that this is her last chance at reconciling old wounds and bringing together a very non-traditional family to learn to love again, to learn to forgive for the first time and to learn to build for the future together once she is gone.

The film is cluttered with a kaleidoscopic menagerie of townspeople and visiting stylists, models and hangers-on. Alan Rickman who has starred in Die Hard, Sense and Sensibility and Michael Collins, plays Phil Allen, a misanthropic barber who has a lesson or two to learn in forgiveness and humility.

Natasha Richardson, who revived the role of Sally Bowles in Cabaret on Broadway plays Shelley, the cancer-stricken mother who must reunite her ex-husband with her lover and reestablish a relationship with her estranged son Brian.

American heartthrob Josh Hartnett, of the recent Virgin Suicides, plays the awkward Brian, who is coming into his own as a man and secretly longs for his family to be reunited. Australian actress Rachel Griffiths plays Sandra, the wild-spirited model who split the family asunder.

The arch-villain of the story is Ray, a scheming, maniacal hairdresser who will try to win at all costs.

His daughter Christina falls in love with Brian as the story unfolds. Supermodel Heidi Klum makes her feature film debut as a super-sexed model who is coiffed above and below the belt by a pair of crazy hairdresser brothers.

The film and its director Paddy Breathnach have a challenge in blending the high camp and laugh-riot shenanigans

of the hairdressing competition with the deeply real and immensely human story of a family at a tumultuous crossroads. For the most part that challenge is well met and the two disparate moods never seem forced or clumsy. But Beaufoy's writing here is not as strong as it was in The Full Monty, and sometimes he slips into character clichés and simplistic resolutions.

It is the cast here that saves the weaknesses in the script. Rickman takes misanthropy to new heights as he struggles to forgive his ex-wife and her lover for having stopped him in his tracks ten years ago. But sometimes Rickman seems too harsh and inflexible, making him somewhat unlikable.

Natasha Richardson, who is increasingly getting to resemble the other great actress in her family, Vanessa Redgrave, gives Shelley a deep humanity and a soulful poignancy without ever succumbing to maudlin overacting, so common in actors playing cancer victims. As she struggles, initially without any success to get to know her son and to get her two families to reconcile, Richardson's subtle emotions and physical grace adds layers to a character that might have been more one-dimensional in lesser hands.

Richardson displays an enormous amount of love for her family and ultimately it is this all-encompassing love that allows her to triumph at the end, both in the contest and in her personal affairs.

Josh Hartnett, the only American playing a Brit, pulls off his accent convincingly for the most part.

With his brunette dyed hair, looking something like a relative of the Munsters, Hartnett turns in a subtle and quiet performance as the awkward son who is trying to find his own footing as a hairdresser and as a man in a topsy-turvy world. Hartnett, who is one to watch for in the future, is both funny and extremely endearing and blends in beautifully with this extremely talented and experienced cast of a few Brits and one Aussie.

Australian Rachel Griffiths, who has never turned in a bad or even mediocre performance, is brilliant once again. Griffiths came to critical acclaim in the indubitably funny Muriel's Wedding where she played a cancer patient. As Sandra, she adds a humanity to the film that sweetly compliments Shelley's love and compassion.

Griffiths has a real knack for blending ridiculous comedy with heart-breaking drama, moving between the two, effortlessly and powerfully. And when she emerges at the end of the final round of the competition

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