BEING GREGORY

Tim Blanchard

(Crackle + Hiss, £12.99)

 

Why would a lad from Luton yearn for Cumbernauld? What romantic allure did this post-war new town, with its universally reviled brutalist town centre, hold for him? The answer is, of course, Gregory’s Girl.

Tim Blanchard’s previous book, 2021’s Magic in the Streets, was a celebration of early-80s indie music weighted heavily towards Scottish groups, so it follows that he would have been equally beguiled by a low-budget Scottish film with a quirky, refreshingly naturalistic take on young love.

His devotion, nurtured for four decades, has resulted in this thoughtful book, which explores the 1981 film and its creator, Bill Forsyth, in revelatory depth. Gregory’s Girl and its even cheaper predecessor That Sinking Feeling were endearing comedies, rightly loved by film fans, but they gave a misleading impression of what Forsyth was about. Pigeonholed early on as a director perfectly suited to light, whimsical material, he is is in fact a cinematic purist who has always viewed his films as “poetical works” and is unsentimental, even slightly dismissive, of the film that put him on the map.

Blanchard places Gregory’s Girl in the context of Bill Forsyth’s cinematic vision, tracing his roots as a maker of documentaries and commercial projects. But he is, at heart, a writer, whose inspirations are more literary than cinematic. He doesn’t even enjoy filming, and feels that by shooting a scene he’s effectively killing it.

Bill Forsyth, in fact, doesn’t really get entertainment. “My idea of entertainment would be something that engaged my mind and made me reflect and wonder about things.”

Happy endings, resolutions, even telling stories in the accepted manner, are anathema to him. He fell in love with cinema in the 1960s by watching French New Wave pictures, which set him on his directorial path. As the declining box-office takings of his later films showed, he was ill-suited to the mainstream market. Gregory’s Girl may have succeeded by doing everything wrong, but doing everything wrong isn’t a strategy for consistent success (even Local Hero made less than $1million profit).

No one has been able to emulate Gregory’s Girl, Blanchard argues, because they have only understood it on the most superficial level. He praises its “passivity”, its “stillness and sense of flow”, regarding it as “an artefact of anti-cinema”, a product of Forsyth’s New Wave influences that attempts to capture how we experience reality by jettisoning all the tried and tested ways of building tension and creating conflict.

Blanchard finally makes his long-awaited pilgrimage to Cumbernauld, the type of location which, in 1981, was free of cultural baggage and made the perfect blank canvas for Forsyth to “take an Existential approach”. He talks to some of the cast and learns of the pivotal role that Glasgow Youth Theatre played in the making of That Sinking Feeling and Gregory’s Girl, forcing the director to learn how to work with actors for the first time, and to let their personalities and chemistry influence the direction the film would take. Their many anecdotes about Forsyth’s attempts to mould, herd and cajole them into a professional cast conjure up a warmth and sense of camaraderie that helps to balance Blanchard’s more cerebral reflections.

By the end, his contention that Being Human, the ambitious 1994 flop starring Robin Williams, was really Gregory’s Girl writ large, the culmination of all Forsyth wanted to express, makes a kind of sense. Perceptive, and commendably thorough, he teases out the subtleties of a charming high school rom-com that generations of film-goers thought they knew inside-out and gets us to see it in a fresh light.