If you like Dusty Springfield or would simply like to be transported perfectly, exquisitely back to the mid 60s and early 70s, you will enjoy "Toast", a cinema adaption of food writer Nigel Slater's autobiographical memoir of his 1960s and 70s Wolverhampton childhood. The clothes, houses, cars, even sweets of the mid 1960s and early 1970s are beautifully reproduced. The Art Director must have haunted auction houses, had 1960s "Simplicity" patterns made up again, found the perfect beige Rover saloon, and the joiners built a perfect 1960s kitchen. Dusty Springfield sings at key points and of course we also see her album "Where am I going" and its turn on a Dansette. Part of your ticket price is in effect a Museum admission, so perfect is your experience.
So skillful is the recreation of the 60s that even the opening credits are by means of long forgotten 60s products on the corner shop shelves with the names of the cast, Writer and Director cleverly stencilled onto them. However if you wish to see characters that skillfully made in Slater, his parents or his stepmother, you might not be so happy. Where, as you look round the 60s kitchen and dining room everything is interesting, unusual, redolent, if you try to understand much about the characters beyond the dislike between son and father or stepmother, you'll find almost nothing.
The characters are not completely free of depth, even if their attempts to communicate always fade. The gorgeous, raucous stepmother the cleaner, Mrs Potter, played superbly by Helena Bonham-Carter tries briefly to find common ground with the child Slater, before reverting to threats. Her character might be some sort of cook-up itself, chain-smoking expressively, always in a 60s curtains one-piece, communicating with her new husband by cooking alone. I wonder if there's some gay dislike of women in this character. More likely it is simply the determined method of the film to have a 3D 1960s, some slapstick, and 2D characters for us to do the best we can with.
Curiously a single character does talk articulately and explain the world around him: Slater's pal at school, who spews out the kind of adult wit and knowledge that American screenwriters like for their grotesque child stars: is the writer simply showing that they really can do dialogue, though they've been forced otherwise to write silent simpletons?
Perhaps many father/son relationships of that era were that distant and silent, mine pretty much was. There was less feeling that fathers need find time or try to talk much to their children if they didn't want to - they were bringing home the bacon and that was enough: we're a million miles from that world now. I wonder if Slater's autobiography would fill us in a lot on this relationship; it's hard for cinema to portray a silent, stuttering relationship like this, and a lot is required of the viewer in experience and imagination. Even I, a contemporary with I think a similarly distant father, felt dumbfounded. Maybe I miss the point; the film avoids the human profundities in order to take us on a delightful ride through the 1960s and early 70s, as light and simple as a Slater soufflé, with some slapstick to keep us amused.
So skillful is the recreation of the 60s that even the opening credits are by means of long forgotten 60s products on the corner shop shelves with the names of the cast, Writer and Director cleverly stencilled onto them. However if you wish to see characters that skillfully made in Slater, his parents or his stepmother, you might not be so happy. Where, as you look round the 60s kitchen and dining room everything is interesting, unusual, redolent, if you try to understand much about the characters beyond the dislike between son and father or stepmother, you'll find almost nothing.
The characters are not completely free of depth, even if their attempts to communicate always fade. The gorgeous, raucous stepmother the cleaner, Mrs Potter, played superbly by Helena Bonham-Carter tries briefly to find common ground with the child Slater, before reverting to threats. Her character might be some sort of cook-up itself, chain-smoking expressively, always in a 60s curtains one-piece, communicating with her new husband by cooking alone. I wonder if there's some gay dislike of women in this character. More likely it is simply the determined method of the film to have a 3D 1960s, some slapstick, and 2D characters for us to do the best we can with.
Curiously a single character does talk articulately and explain the world around him: Slater's pal at school, who spews out the kind of adult wit and knowledge that American screenwriters like for their grotesque child stars: is the writer simply showing that they really can do dialogue, though they've been forced otherwise to write silent simpletons?
Perhaps many father/son relationships of that era were that distant and silent, mine pretty much was. There was less feeling that fathers need find time or try to talk much to their children if they didn't want to - they were bringing home the bacon and that was enough: we're a million miles from that world now. I wonder if Slater's autobiography would fill us in a lot on this relationship; it's hard for cinema to portray a silent, stuttering relationship like this, and a lot is required of the viewer in experience and imagination. Even I, a contemporary with I think a similarly distant father, felt dumbfounded. Maybe I miss the point; the film avoids the human profundities in order to take us on a delightful ride through the 1960s and early 70s, as light and simple as a Slater soufflé, with some slapstick to keep us amused.