Last Christmas review: Emilia Clarke's winning, wince-making romcom goes down as sweetly as an Advocaat snowball
Dir: Paul Feig; Starring: Emilia Clarke, Henry Golding, Emma Thompson, Michelle Yeoh. 12A cert, 103 mins.
Usually, plot spoilers for new films should be avoided at all costs. But in the case of Last Christmas, the viewing experience might be improved tenfold if an usher handed you the full details on a slip of paper on the way in - because, as things stand, the mystery left hanging in the film’s early scenes proves a chronic distraction throughout.
At the very start of Paul Feig’s festive London-set romantic comedy – co-written by Emma Thompson and Bryony Kimmings and emotionally lubricated with the music of Wham! and George Michael – two conspicuously untied threads are waggled in the audience’s faces.
The first is the precise nature of the severe illness recently suffered by its young heroine Kate (Emilia Clarke), an aspiring musical star who auditions between shifts at a year-round Christmas shop waspishly managed by Michelle Yeoh. And the second is whatever the deal is with her mysterious but dashing suitor Tom (Henry Golding) – a winsome gadabout who habitually breaks into miniature dance routines on the pavement, but whom nobody but Kate seems to notice.
In short, we are clearly in the realm of It’s A Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street here – and, as in those Yuletide classics, a tingle of magical mystery permeates the air. But Feig and Thompson bring it to such an immediate and ear-splitting vibrato that it’s impossible to stop thinking about the mystery and relax into their film’s easy-going comic rhythms, or sob along with its dewy-eyed exhortations to treat every moment of life as the ultimate Christmas present.
I spent the first half-hour of Last Christmas mentally workshopping theories about the big twist that was clearly in store, until I came up with one that fitted the evidence – horn-honkingly improbable though it was. Around an hour later, it turned out to be correct.
So yes, Last Christmas sends you out wincing from a narrative oof of potentially legendary proportions. But this is a film designed for annual repeat viewings – and when viewed in that context, with full foreknowledge of the nonsense in store, I suspect it will go down as smoothly and sweetly as an Advocaat snowball.
Because there is an awful lot to enjoy here – starting with Clarke, Game of Thrones’s genocidal Queen of Dragons, who proves a wildly likeable comic lead in the kind of role it’s easy to imagine Thompson herself nailing in her 20s or 30s. Kate is the youngest member of a Croatian family who fled the former Yugoslavia for Britain at the turn of the millennium: Thompson gifts herself an amusingly lugubrious supporting role as her mother.
A heroically disorganised 20-something singleton, Kate’s existence is less Bridget Jones than Fleabag, while her adopted home town, though it turns on the seasonal sparkle for the cameras, is conspicuously truer to life than the litter-picked Richard Curtis standard. The London of Last Christmas is cosmopolitan and rough around the edges, with an obligatory side-serving of Brexit anxiety that grounds it in the here and now (but doesn’t achieve much more than that).
As for the property market, forget the aspirational Borough Market bachelorette pad: Kate is a veteran couch-surfer, whose habit of imposing on friends until their patience runs out is illustrated by a series of wincingly funny vignettes.
Part of the charm of Golding’s Tom is that his life seems blissfully orderly by comparison. He’s affable, self-possessed, dresses well, regularly “works nights” (whatever that means), gets by without a mobile phone, and volunteers at a soup kitchen: the full package when it comes to socially conscious dreamboats. And as a bonus, his intimate knowledge of London makes him a veritable A-Z of twinkling cobbled lanes ideal for romantic evening strolls.
Golding and Clarke’s chemistry is snuggly rather than sexy, but they make an appealing screen couple – and Feig, the director of Bridesmaids and Spy, keeps their comedic rapport tripping along pleasingly at all times. In one scene, Golding does a brief, playful James Bond impression, and while vocally he goes for Connery, you can’t help but notice what a fine, Roger Moore-style 007 he’d make. Nota bene, Barbara Broccoli.
There was surely a smarter version of Last Christmas to be made – one that played its hand more tactically, with twist didn’t land on your head like a grand piano, and a feel for addressing the political climate of the times with a little more finesse than simply having a racist thug bark at eastern Europeans on the bus.
But smart is not what the film appears to be going for, and that’s fine. It’s warm and winning and full-body-huggingly unsubtle enough to penetrate the thickest post-Christmas-lunch haze.
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