Friday, 9 October 2015

"Leading Lady" (Guardian 09/10/15)


Leading Lady **
Dir: Henk Pretorius. With: Katie McGrath, Gil Bellows, Bok van Blerk, Brumilda van Rensburg. 100 mins. Cert: 12A

Both the blandest of romcoms and a film about filmmaking that displays zero feel for the way films are made. Ireland’s Katie McGrath adopts a cut-glass English accent as an actress jetting to South Africa to research a Boer War role, landing at the farm of a rugged local (the marvellously named Bok van Blerk). She’s snooty enough to be mistaken for royalty; he’s rough-edged, but strums the guitar. What could possibly happen? Getting from A to B necessitates countless insipidly scored montages, and while director Henk Pretorius fills the frame with veldt, early glimpses of Big Ben establish the wider lack of ambition: it’s tourist-trap cinema, for gullible eyes only.

Leading Lady opens in selected cinemas from today. 

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