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Reviews (1)
11 Apr, 2019
A millennial condition-of-England masterpiece - undeservedly neglected but now on DVD.
Episodic in the best sense, Nature Boy is at once a condition-of-England statement, an issue-driven drama of great scope, and a tour around England taking in the Barrow peninsula, the North East, the Midlands and Kent. As the picaresque hero David, beautifully played by Lee Ingleby, searches for the idealised father who left when he was four, we touch on drug addiction, single parent families, fostering, child abuse, racism, industrial pollution, cross-class relationships, death of siblings, eco-activism, rural vs. suburban, genetic modification…
But so to summarise Nature Boy makes it sound formulaic and this it almost always avoids. The whole is shot through with the integrating themes of lost childhood, the distorting lens of memory, the fragility and beauty of the English countryside, and the demands that draw us into the cities and suburbs.
In as much as this drama takes sides, we are encourage to adopt David's viewpoint. He engages our sympathies all the more effectively for being no Guardian reader stereotype and he makes the necessary sacrifices: he rescues an orphaned fox-cub but has to shop-lift to feed it; he knows the names of the all the flowers but his reaction to the simplistic opposition to the building of a runway by some displaced new-age urbanites is complex; he lives "close to nature" and is frequently "right manky" as a result.
Indeed, David's state of hygiene and his physicality generally functions as a barometer of his progress. His first kiss and subsequent smile with Jenny (Joanne Froggart) - who with her mother has saved him from utter mankiness - is as tender a moment as any on film. In the final episode he goes with his fellow fruit pickers to the fair ground but only after being urged to "spruce up". Spruced-up, and in the golden sun of an English September, the camera falls for him and so does Katie (Kellie Bright) - she too, irresistibly photogenic in their scenes together. The film has worked hard for this Cider-with-Rosie moment, and both the film and the audience deserve it: it's a long way and a long time from the urban oppression of Barrow.
Young lovers kissing in a flower meadow, having slipped away from the fair after a hard day's apple picking: that this scene is evocative of a Thomas Hardy's pastoral is part of the point: David and Katie are plausibly in-touch with a much older mode of existence.
David and Katie's relationship is altered by discovering a past link and from Katie's mother David quickly finds his father. That the idealised father is a disappointment in the flesh is hardly surprising, although perhaps the nature of the let-down is a little twee - not helped by the bizarre set that stages the denouement and which looks as if it first served in Kubrick's 2001. Nonetheless, the final scenes between father and son are painful and moving.
Strongly recommended: beautifully written, acted and photographed with as comprehensive a portrait of the relationship of England to its countryside as one could wish.
It's great that this drama has finally been released on DVD - it's long overdue. Another free-to-air transmission by the BBC would perhaps rescue it from its totally undeserved obscurity. This review is a slightly edited version of my review of the VHS edition from back in April 2000.