Review of 4.3.2.1 (2010) by Mark H — 04 Jun 2010

4.3.2.1 marks a sensible progression by Noel Clarke, a director who has the serenity to accept that Hollywood blockbusters will always be more widely shown while at the same time driving for British cinema to be a bit more ambitious.

Ambition, as I've said, is good, and it certainly pays off in 4.3.2.1, and it looks more stylish and well constructed than many other British films of the last year or so. The price it pays is around a million studio logos at the beginning to appease all of its financiers, just so you're appreciating the effort this kind of film takes in the UK from frame one.

The trouble is that it's a little disjointed. When we first meet our protagonists, played by Ophelia Lovibond, Tamsin Egerton, Shanika Warren-Markland and Emma Roberts, they're close friends with big plans for the weekend. As they diverge, the waters are muddied somewhat.

The vignette format makes a two hour film feel a lot longer than it really is. That's not a bad thing if it's consistently good, but the countdown to the ending is so overt that by the time we get to the third segment, you'll looking at your watch and wondering how many more stylised flashbacks to the beginning we'll get. It's this that prevents a good film from being great, in my estimation, and I still enjoyed 4.3.2.1 a lot.

What's good about the film is very good. There's a strong sense of humour running throughout and there's some fine acting too. All four of the leads are fantastic, with Lovibond and Warren-Markland in particular showing off what they can do in their first major roles. Likewise, Roberts and Egerton are very likable.

As each of the four parts of the story centres on one of them, it'd be easy to overlook the rest of the cast, but they were excellent too. Any film that casts Nick Briggs, voice of the Daleks, as the face of a supermarket chain has to be good in my book. Clarke himself has a role that appears at first to massage his ego, but is nicely and quickly subverted in the course of the plot's escalation.

Gender politics is an interesting topic in this film, really. If the women are put down, they always go down swinging and they're all very capable of getting even, but you wonder if they had to dispense with their clothes in the process. Clarke wrote the script after someone told him he didn't write women well, and he mostly proves them wrong, but he's at cross-purposes when still trying to avoid alienating the audiences who made him successful, i.e. young men.

This is most apparent in a lesbian sex scene midway through, with dynamic camera angles on the naked women, set to blaring house music. Compare this to a relatively chaste hetero scene earlier, which is more important to a character's story than the latter scene and unfolds fairly routinely.

4.3.2.1 may be Clarke's most vigorous film to date, and it just barely overshoots the desired effect. The narrative is somewhat entangled in its structure and the gender politics don't quite balance out. To compensate for empowered women, the men are all of the type you see in adverts- incompetent pillocks.

Nevertheless, it's a film about four women who are capable, independent and sexualised without being objectified, well-acted by all concerned. Insert joke about not going to see Sex and the City 2 here.

This is the more stylish and entertaining alternative, and it's worth supporting in cinemas if you want to see more ambitious British films.