Wish You Were Here

Critics from every corner of the globe have been flipping over a 16-year-old English actress named Emily Lloyd. The occasion for this outpouring of adulation (and adjectives) is Lloyd’s debut in Wish You Were Here, an atmospheric British film about growing up in a coastal town in the early 1950s.

Critics have been known to jump blindly onto bandwagons, and sometimes hype is a factor in excessive critical enthusiasm. But this is real. From her very first moments onscreen, Emily Lloyd shines with the incandescence of a screen natural. She looks a little like Ellen Barkin, but even closer to the very young, almond-eyed Simone Signoret. The camera loves her, and she has the kind of sparkling immediacy that many actors never achieve after a lifetime of training.

Writer-director David Leland’s movie almost demands a great performance, for it is short on narrative structure and movement, heavy on character study. Lloyd plays Lynda, a directionless but smart-tongued lass of 15. Her mother is dead and her father (Geoffrey Hutchings) is remote, and Lynda lives for the pleasure of shocking other people: deliberately scorching a hairdo during a brief stint as a hairdresser, hiking up her knickers in a bus station during an equally brief job with a bus company, dumping French fries on the head of a parted lover.

Leland, who wrote the scripts for Mona Lisa and Personal Services, is better at getting individual scenes to shine than he is at defining the overall form of the movie. There’s something about the last segment of the film, when Lynda strikes out on her own and flees to a resort town, that seems hurried and overly tidy.

But some of those individual scenes really have luster. Lynda’s sexual initiation, for instance, with a bus conductor (Jesse Birdsall) who models himself in suavity after Hugh Hefner, is played for laughs. It’s the opposite of the usual such scene in coming-of-age movies, which is almost always heavy-breathing and scary. Here, Lynda sees the experience as a rather giggly romp.

Then there’s a great scene after Lynda’s father sends her to a psychiatrist to explore her rebelliousness and incessant swearing. The shrink, a peculiar chap who keeps a monkey’s head on his desk, has her go through her entire profane vocabulary, naming all the nasty words in alphabetical order.

Leland finds a wonderful atmosphere in the seaside communities where the action takes place. And the film heads into darker territory with the appearance of an eerie, middle-aged man (Tom Bell) who draws Lynda into a more disturbing place entirely.

But the film just wouldn’t succeed without Emily Lloyd, who gives it such joy. It’s impossible to say where the future will take this very young person, as many young actors lose their gift when age and experience set in. But with this performance she’s earned the spotlight.

First published in The Herald, August 18, 1987

Things did not work out for Emily Lloyd, who has had a variety of struggles since her early heyday. Leland based both this film and Personal Services on the life of Cynthia Payne, a real-life madam, although the movies are not explicitly connected.