Celeste (Greta Bellamacina) and Stella (Sadie Brown) in Hurt By Paradise
HURT BY PARADISE
Directed by Greta Bellamacina
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆
THERE is a hotel about a mile from the centre of Margate called the Walpole Bay Hotel. It is the best kept secret of many a Londoner in the know: a lovely retreat, quirky but not pretentious, decked out like an Edwardian museum packed with interesting objects, and it is entirely fitting that this strange, low budget and enjoyable film features scenes shot in the Walpole.
It too may be cheap, but as with the Walpole, it just shows what you can do with some imagination and talent.
Celeste (played by director Greta Bellamacina) is a poet whose art allows her to express her confusion at the world around her.
Her father disappeared 20 years ago, she is a single mother whose child’s father is also absent, and her mother is a spiky hag who offers little in support (but plenty in laughs – she is one of a host of superbly drawn characters which have a Fleabag feel to them).
Celeste’s downstairs neighbour Stella (Sadie Brown) is a lonely woman whose career as an actress has never taken off. She looks after Celeste’s son and yearns to sparkle at auditions. She has found joy in life through conversing online with a mysterious man called Roman: she thinks true love is heading her way.
Celeste, meanwhile, when not writing verse, pushing her son about locations in Camden or searching for coins at the bottom of a bag, is calling up everyone in the phone book with the same surname as her errant father.
Their situations sets scenes played for both drama and laughs: Bellamacina has an eye for a simple joke coupled with great dialogue.
Some moments work well: Celeste’s meetings with creepy literary agents are shriekingly funny, and this is a film populated by men whose sole role is to be figures of fun as soon as they open their mouths. That too works well.
Celeste’s poetry, accompanied by a piano, provides a wistful voiceover throughout. It helps carry the gentleness of the plot, which is at its heart about two friends and their love for one another.
It is hard to judge if the poetry that overlaps each scene is infused with literary worth: some of the lines you catch are sky-high ridiculous, perhaps intentionally, perhaps not. But it is read in a soothing meter and rhythm, and added to gentle tinkling incidental music, something that could be stomach-churningly bad is instead pretty good.
There are cracks here and there – it walks a thin line at times between a pretentious, low-rent London mumblecore movie, to being something that pokes fun at the genre and plays on its strengths.
It will be interesting to see what comes next for this director.
