THE FULL MONTY (70)

Directed by: Peter Cattaneo

Starring: Robert Carlyle, Tom Wilkinson, Mark Addy

The Pitch: Five unemployed steelworkers decide to try for a bit of cash as male strippers.

Theo Sez: A feelgood crowd-pleaser with musical interludes : not far removed from the effervescent likes of STRICTLY BALLROOM - yet, somehow, what comes to mind is closer to BICYCLE THIEVES. Maybe it's the emphasis on the relationship between a sad-sack father and his grave-faced young son, or maybe it's the grim jobless setting, Ken Loach territory with a sardonic twist - even the Working Men's Club has become a strip-joint. It's not a film about escaping problems (there's no escaping this place) but about coming to terms, the problem in this case being the emasculation of Nineties Man - which, judging by the film's success, seems to be very much a part of whatever makes up our current Zeitgeist (especially perhaps in England, where the shift from taciturnity to touchy-feely, traditionally "feminine" virtues - as in the weepy emotionalism of the Princess Di hysteria - has left Strong Silent Types, deprived by unemployment of "breadwinner" status, fatally uncertain about their roles). As someone says here, "In a few years men won't even exist anymore - except in zoos. We're useless...Obsolete" ("Like skateboards," adds one of his mates helpfully) : it's a film in which men have become infantilised, playing childish pranks and shoplifting like delinquent teenagers. The climax, stripping for the pleasure of a predatory mob of women (one of them even pees standing up!), is effective because it's such a bittersweet kind of triumph - an exuberantly happy ending, but also the ultimate castration (no wonder one of the guys worries about the audience bringing a pair of scissors to the show!). It's not just a case, as in STRICTLY BALLROOM or PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT, of Going Against The System or Doing Your Own Thing - if anything, our heroes give their audience exactly what it's looking for : it's more a case of accepting a new reality, and turning defeat into triumph by doing so with humour and dignity. That these characters are already stripped naked for the world to laugh at when the film begins is why their public exhibition (-cum-humiliation) is so brave, and their success so exhilarating ; that their long-term future will be just as bleak when they wake up next morning is why this modest, cinematically undistinguished film is one for the time-capsule.