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Review by Eric Hillis (@hilliseric)
Directed by: Ben Charles Edwards
Starring: Michael Winder, Max Bennett, Sally Phillips, Gerard McDermott, Sadie Frost, Noel Fielding, Lily Loveless
The film's one standout moment features a melancholy magician (David Hoyle) who weaves a touching monologue around a card trick. It's a moment of warmth in an otherwise cold film.
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"Sometimes all it takes to become friends is to be the only two people in the room who aren't c*nts!" That's the crude creedo that brings together Art (Michael Winder) and Sal (Max Bennett), the central protagonists of Ben Charles Edwards' ambitious but dreary directorial debut, Set the Thames on Fire, a blackly comic steampunk drama set in a dystopian fantasy London.
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Art is a struggling pianist who takes a gig performing at a Halloween party attended by a collection of grotesque upper-class types and presided over by an underworld figure known as The Impresario (Gerard McDermott). It's there he encounters Sal, employed as a waiter, and the two instantly bond over their dislike of their fellow attendees and London itself.
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Like Midnight Cowboy by way of Terry Gilliam, Set the Thames on Fire follows the two young men as they wander through this heavily stylised vision of a future Dickensian London, drifting past beautiful matte paintings and encountering a variety of Fellini-esque characters, while an Orwellian tannoy system informs the residents of London of their ongoing plight. As with Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo, they're on a quest to cobble together the money that will allow them to escape their city for warmer climes, in this case Egypt.
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The film offers up a series of vignettes based around Art and Sal's encounters, most of which leave little impression. They meet Art's horny landlady, played by Sadie Frost, one of the film's producers; they attend a pop concert, the music replaced by classical piano and slo-mo dancing in a scenario we've witnessed many times before; they find themselves in the S&M dungeon of a transgender man (Noel Fielding) - a set-piece that borders on homophobia by mining the prospect of gay sex for cheap laughs. The one standout encounter is that with a melancholy magician (David Hoyle) who weaves a touching monologue around a card trick. It's a moment of warmth in an otherwise cold film.
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Set the Thames on Fire is in cinemas from 16th September, on demand from 19th September and on DVD from 26th September.