★★★★☆
A perfect storm of talent collides to create one of cinema’s great doomed love dramas. The director Stephen Frears, at the time white-hot from My Beautiful Laundrette, combines with Gary Oldman, who was sizzling from Sid and Nancy, and the writer Alan Bennett to deliver a witty, engrossing and darkly disturbing tale of the professional jealousies and intimate tensions between the playwright Joe Orton (Oldman) and his increasingly demented lover, Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina).
Encased in a noirish mystery, with tongue-in-cheek shades of Citizen Kane, the film casts Wallace Shawn as John Lahr, the theatric critic and Orton biographer who is trying to piece together the essence of Orton’s life — as well as the seeds of his violent death — at the hands of Halliwell. Biographical flashbacks and flash-forwards, and sidelong glances at the theatrical high life in 1960s London (enter Vanessa Redgrave, alarmingly good, as the literary agent Peggy Ramsay) are mere background for the central riveting showpiece — namely the destructive, competitive and cruel relationship between Orton and Halliwell.
Oldman tends to get the plaudits for his version of the cocksure, self-admiring hedonist in Fonzie leathers and white T-shirt, but Molina has rarely been better. His rage at Orton’s exploding fame and romantic betrayals, which eventually becomes homicidal, is even more chilling because it’s oddly logical. Unrequited love has rarely been more bleak, or brilliantly described.
15, 105min
Prick Up Your Ears is screening at the BFI Southbank, London SE1, from today