Scottish director David Mackenzie is a major artist, but he’s seriously neglected in the U.S. He won strong reviews for his unsettling literary adaptations Young Adam (2003) and Asylum (2005), but since the limited release of the latter, his work has gone unnoticed, despite the fact he’s gotten more adventurous with each film. Hallam Foe (2007), starring Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot) as a Holden Caulfield-like sociopath, was an exhilarating coming-of-age movie with an adult, sometimes frightening tone; it opened here to scant press under the unhelpful new title Mister Foe. After that Mackenzie moved to Los Angeles briefly and made the Balzacian moral tale Spread (2009), with Ashton Kutcher brilliantly cast as a shallow Beverly Hills gigolo on his way down the social ladder. Its most complex emotional transactions are staged in extended, meticulously choreographed crane shots evoking Max Ophuls (La Ronde, Lola Montes), yet most American reviewers, if they bothered to write about it at all, dismissed it as a failed Kutcher sex comedy.
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Tonight You’re Mine—titled You Instead in the UK—is an earthy romantic comedy shot in just five days during Scotland’s T in the Park music festival. As formally ambitious as anything Mackenzie’s done, the movie has turned up in Chicago at Red Box DVD rental kiosks, which advertise it as a teenpic along the lines of From Justin to Kelly. The story (which echoes both It Happened One Night and Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps) begins as two feuding rock singers (Luke Treadaway and Natalia Tena) are handcuffed together at the festival by a prankster, then follows them over the next day and a half as they fall in love. Mackenzie counters the predictable story with the unpredictable reality of the event itself, shooting much of the movie guerilla-style among the festivalgoers (estimated at 85,000 in the final credits) and setting major scenes in public campgrounds and recreation areas. Yet what really distinguishes the movie—and may account for how Mackenzie has been marginalized in the U.S.—is his uncommon seriousness about sensual pleasure.
In a pleasant reversal of genre convention, Adam and Morello don’t spend the rest of the movie bickering before they realize they love each other, nor do they have much trouble dissuading the suspicions of their significant others. In fact the two couples soon become friendly, and after Morello’s band performs (with Adam as a de facto fifth member), the four explore the festival as one. It’s the film’s most audacious sequence, presenting familiar date activities (dancing, going on amusement park rides) as euphoric communal experiences. Mackenzie can’t resist making an allusion to group sex, though it proves nothing more than a sly innuendo: the four wind up sharing a bed, but only to sleep.
Directed by David Mackenzie
