Big-hearted tale of gay teens’ faux-mance
LIKE Days Of The Bagnold Summer (see above), Dating Amber is a drama about the teenage condition, full of laughs but slightly too painful to be described as a comedy.
Set in County Wicklow in the mid-1990s, it stars Fionn O’Shea, whom you might recognise as the objectionable Jamie in the hit RTE TV series Normal People.
He plays Eddie, whose classmates at secondary school rib him for being gay. They don’t know if he is; he’s just not an alpha male. But he is indeed struggling with his sexuality, unwilling to admit it even to himself.
Meanwhile, his fellow pupil Amber (Lola Petticrew) is also gay, and also on the receiving end of homophobic abuse, which has only ever eased, briefly, in the wake of her father’s suicide. So the pair of them cook up a plan. If they pretend to be a couple, it will stop the bullying. That’s the premise of David Freyne’s highly enjoyable film, which is all the funnier for its deliberate lack of subtlety.
The crass homophobes at school, Eddie’s macho soldier father, even his more sympathetic mum (nicely played by Sharon Horgan) are all caricatures to one extent or another, but that doesn’t diminish the poignancy as Eddie and Amber become more at ease with their homosexuality. It’s a lovable, big-hearted story.
ANDREW SLATER’S documentary Echo In The Canyon whisks us 30 years further back in time, remembering the California folkrock scene of the mid-1960s. Jakob Dylan, Bob’s son, interviews many of the movers and shakers — those who have somehow survived all the drugs and booze. There are some great insights into how the bands of the time influenced each other.
Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys recalls the impact The Beatles’ album Rubber Soul made on him, and how he then went away and made Pet Sounds. This in turn, as Ringo Starr concedes, was a major influence on Sgt. Pepper. If you love all that stuff, as I do, this will be 82 minutes well spent.