Avis des critiques

Thanks to the pudding-thick accents and the dozens of tangents that don't directly feed the narrative, it's easy to get a little lost. But that's sort of the film's hope. To strand you on an island surrounded by momentous tides of music and dance. To turn everyday life, the ups and downs of London in the '50s, into the stuff of cinematic fantasy.

Most movies are made of scenes; others are devoted to making the scene. Julien Temple's "Absolute Beginners" is one — a big-budget spectacle that, made in 1986, sought to render four decades of Anglo-American pop culture as a symphonic music video... Few musicals are as madly ambitious as Mr. Temple's magnum opus, now reissued in Blu-ray by Twilight Time.

A fascinating attempt by rock video director Julien Temple to do several things at once — adapt a Colin MacInnes novel, show the London youth scene in 1958 (while dealing at length with the racial tensions of the period), build on some of the stylistic innovations of Frank Tashlin, Vincente Minnelli, and Orson Welles, and put to best use a fascinating score by Gil Evans that adapts everything from Charles Mingus to Miles Davis.