1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 102: Loved up
Her drunk, laughing mother climbs into the tiny bed with her. For 18-year-old Sarah (Lena Headey), it’s the last straw. She resolves to leave home. A younger sister is left to contend for herself.
What could have been a depressing first scene is oddly bouyant. It’s lightened by notes from Leftfield’s song “Melt.” Rave music sounds throughout the whirlwind opening third of this 70-minute BBC movie for teens, as Sarah meets, takes ecstasy from, and moves in with Tom (Ian Hart). There are tracks by Orbital, the Prodigy, and similar artists.
Trainspotting, the more famous drugs-and-techno movie, was released around the same time. Loved Up is much gentler. It’s basically an earlier version of The Spectacular Now, treating of an unsettled but ultimately tethered girl and her rootless boyfriend.
Tom lives in the Now. He pretends not to – he takes pride in his regular employment and considers his after-hours partying to be well-earned – but the truth is, he parties all day long. He plays with the merchandise in the toy shop where he works. He can’t relax at home: his friends are always dropping in, and he hankers for the club.
The movie’s final two-thirds are a gradual come-down from the initial high. But what a high!
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As soon as Tom has given Sarah ecstasy, he takes her to his pals. They all go clubbing and joyriding, and when a postal truck loses a sack of mail, the revelers open the letters and drive around the neighborhood, delivering the happy-sounding ones. Bills and such, they throw away because, what use is unhappy news?
Then, at the flat, Tom and Sarah consummate their new love. The movie may have been broadcast to teens, but its U.S. rating would have been a solid “R.”
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Hart and Headey would go on to excel in blockbusters: respectively, in Harry Potter and in Game of Thrones. Headey would also hold her own as Stellan Skarsgård’s co-star in Aberdeen, playing a more-grown-up version of Sarah.
I guess Loved Up is a cautionary tale, but Hart’s and Headey’s heedless glee is what makes it worthwhile. Hart and, especially, Headey are infectious early on – Headey for her wide-eyed innocence as she enters Tom’s funhouse scene, Hart for his pose of worldly assurance. The eventual undermining of these stances is a poignant, if minor, tragedy.
That’s not to put down the rest of the movie. There are some fine later sequences. Sarah invites Tom to meet her alcoholic mother, and Tom obtusely brings along a pal – and a bottle of sherry. Later, when, in an emergency, Sarah summons Tom, he loses the address and tells the cab driver to just wander after other cars.
Meanwhile, Sarah makes her own blunders, losing her job, trying to compensate for forgetting her sister’s birthday, and allowing herself to grow too close to Tom’s dealer (a charming, snaky Jason Isaacs).
None of this is irreparable. There’s little of Trainspotting’s doom and gloom. One realizes, of course, that Tom will have to wake up, or else. The movie isn’t quite an argument for shortsighted revelry, but it doesn’t come down hard against it, either. What it does argue against is the permanency of this state.
I don’t think any viewer – teen-aged or otherwise – would wish to end up like Sarah’s mother.