TV Cream

Films: M is for...

Memoirs of a Survivor

Decidedly wayward adaptation of abstruse and famously not bothered Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing’s tale of a marble-shedding Julie Christie holed up in a feral future London with a teenage girl. An odd mixture of Survivors (Christopher Guard runs a back-to-nature commune) and any number of ‘spooky’ children’s TV serials from the 1970s, when Julie finds – or probably hallucinates – a portal to a Victorian household headed by Nigel Hawthorne behind a rubbery wall in her flat. It all leads up to Guard’s kiddie commune rampaging the dirty streets, before a big egg turns up in Julie’s flat and everybody climbs into it. The combination of iffy effects, egg-and-chips direction and an omnipresent plonking Radiophonic-esque soundtrack lock this future firmly in a very specific past. And all the better for it, of course.

1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. Tom Ronson

    May 23, 2022 at 11:37 pm

    One of the few films I’ve watched almost to the very end but found myself unable to clear the final hurdle. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, though I do like the phrase ‘egg-and-chips direction.’

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To Top