Disasterpiece Theater

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Forget the Official Secrets Act. All that the Brits are going to catch with that one is a few harmless former spies eking out their pensions with ripping yarns about the bad old days in MI5. No, what they need over there is an Unofficial Secrets Act -- something that will stop the English underclass from converting squalid youthful memories into rude, shrewd, occasionally lewd movies of the kind that have lately been jostling away at one another -- and at our innocent colonial funny bones. As a group they form a kind of Disasterpiece Theater, more blithely brutal than typically British, and likely to prove ruinous to the national image, not to mention the tourist trade.

Even the most mild mannered of these new movies, Withnail and I, is a shock to our expectations. American literati are, after all, conditioned to share the Lake poets' faith in the restorative powers of the pastoral: the thatch tight on the cottage roof, the peat glowing on the grate, the cattle posing for a painting by Constable. The vision is especially poignant if you are as deeply down as was the "and I" of the title (played by Paul McGann) and as angrily out as his roommate Withnail (Richard E. Grant) when they were aspiring actors in London two decades ago.

They fear that creatures unknown to science are gestating in the sink of their slum flat. They know their agents can give them just as short shrift by long distance. Perhaps a country visit will rescue their faith in the universe's orderliness. Well, they have reckoned without the rain, mud and chill. Or the bull in a neighbor's field. Or the queenly ardor of Withnail's Uncle Monty (a sweetly mad Richard Griffiths), who turns up to pursue his hopeless passion for "and I." Somehow, Wordsworth failed to mention these inconveniences.

Ambitious Withnail sees them as portents. If he cannot realize the simple dream of a healthful week in the country, what chance does he have of becoming the next Olivier? "And I" is more sanguine and delighted to get a job in provincial rep. Thus he begins that patient paddle up life's stream, in the course of which he will come to accept this experience for what it was -- a & youthful funk, to be recouped through laughter, not a great existential turning to be brooded on.

Acceptance! This is the preferred English path these days. What is missing in the new English sensibility, but not deeply missed, is a sentimentalized view of the misfortunate and the class animus that have energized English movies of the past 40 years. The new radicalism is psychological, not political, and it is often expressed as cheeky self-sufficiency.

No one expresses cheek more winsomely than the remarkable Emily Lloyd, 16, who plays Lynda, the teenage heroine of Writer-Director David Leland's Wish You Were Here! In the course of writing the film Personal Services -- a raffishly surreal account of Cynthia Payne's career as a divinely unhypocritical London madam that illuminated American screens early this year -- Leland learned enough about her early life to offer this prequel. And a marvelously uncluttered tale it is.

Lynda is a force of nature, whirlwinding through a seaside resort in the 1950s. She is one of those rare adolescents whose contempt for bourgeois caution is a kind of hormonal fire storm, too intense to be smothered by conventional explanation or even by unconventional sexual encounters. The most notable of these is with Eric (Tom Bell), who is old enough to be her father but not strong enough to be her mate. Or, in her estimation, the father of her child. Lynda's decision to have the baby may not qualify as a triumph of the human spirit, but it is, like her subsequent career as the notorious "Madam Cyn," a victory for sheer, uncalculated nerve.

Say the same for Rita, Sue and Bob Too. The former (Siobhan Finneran and Michelle Holmes) baby-sit for the latter (George Costigan). When he drives them home after work, they chipperly take turns putting out for him. A minimum of romantic spirit and a maximum of haste mark these encounters. Monosyllabically written by Andrea Dunbar, directed with documentary flatness by Alan Clarke, this movie achieves a cinematic rarity: a perfect lack of grace. And thus a perfect match of style and subject. If we believed these figures were capable of rising above themselves and their drab surroundings, we would probably be appalled by their rutting ways. As it is, we see that the consummation toward which they rudely slouch, a menage a trois, represents undreamed-of fulfillment. Been down so long it looks like up to them.

There is bravery and originality in the bluntness of these movies. And in + their avoidance of melodramatic hype and improbably heartening resolutions, there are lessons American movies might learn. Still, one retreats with relief to the accustomed elegances of a well-made film like The Whistle Blower. To be sure, the paranoia that long ago settled damply around our spy dramas seems to have drifted eastward to infect Writer Julian Bond and Director Simon Langton. Their story has the British espionage establishment protecting a highly placed mole by murdering innocent, clerkish underlings in an attempt to convince its American allies that it is doing something about a leak the latter are complaining about.

The explanation for the excessive intricacy of this contrivance is too thin. But Nigel Havers is fine as a victim at once too earnest and erratic for his own good. And Michael Caine is marvelous as his father, trying his best not to believe the worst about his son's fate. No movie actor works more patiently to achieve his emotional effects. No matter what stimulating mischief the young folks of British cinema are up to, one prays that the sun never sets on him or on this greatest of English movie genres.