@ Cineworld Thu 22 Jun and Odeon Sun 25 Jun 2017
Part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival
Charting the course of a ten-year relationship from its blossoming beginning to its messy end, Modern Life is Rubbish is the expansion of a 13-minute short made by director Daniel Jerome Gill back in 2009. It features struggling musician Liam (Josh Whitehouse) and driven graphic designer Nat (Freya Mavor) as they try to make a mismatched relationship work, starting at the breakup and working backwards to tell their commonplace but still unique story.
Named for the Blur album, the movie signals its intentions to play up its self-consciously muso roots from the get-go, featuring the likes of Frightened Rabbit and Radiohead early on. But for all the protagonist’s posturing as a martyr to the alternative rock cause, there is bags of room for radio fodder such as Stereophonics, The Kooks and The Vaccines. At times, it feels like the writer (Philip Gawthorne) has attempted to shoehorn as many songs into the film as possible in order to show off his eclectic tastes, but in reality the soundtrack only reflects the music library of, in Nat’s own words, “a closet populist”.
The populist in question is the society-bashing, self-obsessed, tortured soul Liam, who is too busy raging against the machine to realise that the machine is far too big an animal to be effectively raged against, and that it actually has some quite useful things to offer society despite its apparently all-encompassing oppression, and that in order to rage properly, it might be an idea to get up off the sofa and lift a finger to do so, once in a while. His introductory speech to Nat about Blur’s back catalogue is so skin-crawlingly pretentious and self-important that it’s a wonder she puts up with him for any length of time at all.
Indeed, Liam’s unlikability grates so much that it threatens to jeopardise the film as a whole. Other than one wry remark about the difference between “man fine” and “woman fine” and a neat Radiohead Easter egg, Liam says very little that holds any insight, despite the loftiness with which he regards himself. Fortunately, the last twenty minutes of the film undo something of the damage, albeit with over-the-top cheesiness and a sorry-sorry-take-me-back-please package that would give the dimensions of the Tardis a run for its money.
All in all, Modern Life is Rubbish is a watchable and all-too believable love story about two London lovebirds trying to make things work in contemporary society. As the debut offering from a fledgling director, it’s not a bad effort, but it should be hoped that much like the Blur album from which it takes its name, there are better things to come from Gill and Gawthorne.