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We Think The World Of You

1988, Movie, PG, 94 mins

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Socially commentative and allegorical, WE THINK THE WORLD OF YOU is also a scalding comedy of manners and a strangely compelling love story. Set in the 1950s, this adaptation of Joseph R. Ackerly's novel stars Alan Bates as Frank Meadows, a well-to-do, middle-aged civil servant who is in love with the young, working-class, married Johnny Burney (Gary Oldman). After Johnny is imprisoned for breaking and entering, Frank develops an obsessive attachment to his former lover's pet Alsatian, Evie. Just as Frank's love for Evie is a perversion of his natural feeling for Johnny, so this story is a transposition of the love that dare not speak its name, in the 1950s or today. As an allegorical response to social intolerance of homosexual expression, WE THINK THE WORLD OF YOU is fairly compelling and relevant to Thatcher-era England. Frank and Johnny's affair is never made explicit, the film's muted color scheme suggests the repressed nature of the society it depicts, and the claustrophobic mise-en-scene reflects the characters' existential entrapment. The film's real strength is its refusal to sentimentalize the absurd-but-real love story of man and dog; Bates' carefully modulated performance makes Frank's obsession with Evie quite credible. leave a comment
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