World Premiere/ Rom-Com
Showing @Filmhouse 1, Thu 16 June @ 22:10 & Fri 17 June Filmhouse 2 @ 17:55
Carter Ferguson / United Kingdom / 2010 / 93 mins
Do cross-class relationships exist? Can women view themselves as anything other than prizes to be won? Can Scotland ever produce a rom-com to rival the position on the pedestal Gregory’s Girl sits on? If Fast Romance, from first time director Carter Ferguson, is anything to go by the answer is a resounding no. Following the life of a group of mainly inter-related ‘wegies, Fast Romance hinges on some kind of belief that the ideas in Love Actually needed a Scottish counter-part with speed-dating as the hook. The working-class quirky lass who snorts gets with a middle-class eloquent type until she realises she’s better off staying within her status and settles for the nice, ginger, postal-worker. Meanwhile some other stuff happens with a con-man police officer and a dying mum.
Filmmaking has never been more easy, accessible and cheap than it is now, which is why it’s so alarming that films of this quality are deemed festival worthy; low budget cinema does not have to look like this. With an unrelenting soundtrack better suited to a 1980s soap, a director that forgot to tell the actors that more than two expressions are usually needed for a 93 min film and post-production so invisible that the footage looked like rushes, the aesthetics of Fast Romance are a depressing testament to what is possible. But Fast Romance has problems beyond its production values: representing women as desperate, sad, thoughtless creatures that battle with one another in jealous fits of ostentatious exposure, unable to fathom the idea that people from different socio-economic backgrounds would be able to develop a relationship, Fast Romance is stuck in an era, both aesthetically and idealistically, that we really should be moving on from. Especially with the Scottish voice which has such an intimate relationship with representing the under-represented.