Quadrophenia (1979)

16 October 2019

Tonight was Quadrophenia (1979). I tried watching it last night, and fell asleep, by the way. I've owned the album by The Who for years and really like it, and I owned the movie for a long time but never really had a lot of interest to watch it.

This film stars Phil Daniels as Jimmy, Leslie Ash as Steph, and Philip Davis as Chalky. It's a teenage angst film, and made me think a lot of The Catcher in the Rye (which I also don't like). Jimmy's a screw-up and he tries to fit in with the Mods in 60s Britain. There's a riot and his life kinda implodes. In my opinion it's a really slow start, and if you find the characters annoying that's not going to help you through the 2 hour film. I felt the last half hour was interesting, but at that point it was finally taking in music from the Quadrophenia album and getting a bit of character development post-riot.

To be fair the Rhino DVD wasn't great, and made some of the dialogue difficult - and instead of a subtitle track they had a "trivia" track (although that had some humor to it). The thicker accents weren't always easy to understand.

It does give a snapshot to that era, and it has some interesting parts to it: Sting's film debut, some interesting riot scenes, and some of the music [toward the end]. I prefer the album a thousand times over the film though. 4/10