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Today's NY Times

British Lottery Funds Help Lowbrow Film Win a Jackpot of Outrage
By SARAH LYALL

Published: March 16, 2004

LONDON, March 15 — Perhaps the best reason to go see "Sex Lives of the Potato Men," a film that one critic called "a sump of untreated dung," is to investigate whether it successfully lives up to its advance hype. Is it really, as some critics have decreed, the worst British movie ever made?

"It was absolute rubbish," agreed Charles Chandler, 59, who recently took a field trip with his wife to see the film, which opened last month. It chronicles the lewd escapades of a group of puerile 30-ish men who deliver potatoes to fish and chip shops in the Midlands. Mr. Chandler mentioned particularly a scene in which one of the men picks his nose and admires (in loving detail, along with the audience) what he finds there. "There's really no reason for that at all," he said.

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What particularly outraged him as well as London's film critics and editorial writers were not necessarily the masturbation sequences involving strawberry jam and fish paste; or the close-ups of piles of freshly deposited dog feces in the park; or the weird sex scenes between Mackenzie Crook, who plays the strange-haired worker in the BBC television series "The Office," and a terrifying, zeppelin-bosomed older woman.

What sent the film over the edge in their minds was that half its budget of $3.25 million, came from public funds. The money was allocated by the U.K. Film Council, a public body financed by the national lottery, whose mission is to promote the British film industry. The critic Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian, "The urgent debate for our native film industry seems to me to be as follows: should we put the gun barrel to our temples, or in our mouths for a cleaner kill?"

Sniffing a good issue in the air, several politicians quickly jumped onto the anti-"Potato Men" bandwagon, although it was unclear whether they had actually seen the film. "The lottery was not meant to fund coarse, base movies like this," Anne Widdecombe, a Conservative member of Parliament, said with a huff in The Daily Mail. Julie Kirkbride, the culture spokeswoman for the Conservative Party, told that newspaper that while "you can produce any old rubbish with your own money," members of the lottery-ticket-buying public "don't want to feel their money is being wasted."

The film's release came at a particularly awkward time for the British film industry. Last month the government closed a tax loophole that allowed wealthy investors to claim tax relief on movie investments, saying that investors were cynically exploiting the system for financial gain, not because the movies were necessarily any good.

But the announcement, which filmmakers said came as a complete surprise to them, has thrown into confusion a number of productions that had financing in place and were on the verge of being filmed. Among the films in jeopardy is the $90.2 million "Tulip Fever," based on Deborah Moggach's novel of the same name, about a tempestuous love affair set in 17th-century Amsterdam.

Subsidizing the arts from the national lottery, a major source of financing for opera, ballet, museums and other enterprises in Britain, is always a fraught subject because there is so much disagreement over what is a worthwhile project and because, especially in the film industry, money can be lost so easily.

The film council typically allocates some $36.1 million (£20 million) a year to British films, on both flops ("Revengers Tragedy," a film based on Thomas Middleton's play, on which it spent $920,000 on a film that made just $75,000 at the box office, according to Film Council figures) and hits ("Gosford Park," Robert Altman's elegantly witty upstairs-downstairs murder mystery, in which it invested $3.61 million and which grossed $73 million worldwide). Ian Thomson, a spokesman for the film council, defended the group's investment in "Potato Men," saying that the council was obliged to invest in low art as well as high art.

"It's a bawdy sex comedy," Mr. Thomson said in an interview. "That's what it is. Nothing more than that." There are no plans to release it in the United States.

He allowed as how the film was probably not "my cup of tea," personally but said that it "potentially had an audience which hasn't been delivered to over the last three years," namely loutish men who do not care what critics think about films because they do not read the newspapers. "I think we always knew that this film wasn't going to be critic-led," he said.

That is an understatement. Even by the standards of British critics, the reviews stand out as especially, competitively abysmal. The novelist Will Self, writing in The Evening Standard, called the movie "mirthless, worthless, toothless, useless"; a reviewer for The Times of London called it a "master class in nauseous ineptitude"; and Richard Bacon, writing in The People, a down-market tabloid, said that "at 83 minutes, it's roughly 90 minutes too long."

Since "Sex Lives of the Potato Men" was released, those responsible for making it have been hard to find. A spokesman for its distributor, Entertainment Films, said the film's producer, Anita Overland, had left for a long vacation and that no one connected to the production was willing to comment. The weekend after the film's release, though, Andy Humphries, the director and screenwriter, broke his silence in an article in The Guardian. He was unrepentant, saying that his film was "based on my real experiences" and that its intended audience was not "middle-aged, middle-class film critics" but ordinary people.

"When you make a film full of references to masturbation, oral sex and porn, you already know you're not going to be competing with `Lost in Translation' and `Cold Mountain' for Oscar nominations," Mr. Humphries wrote, explaining that he was inspired by "the stupidity of men."

Mr. Humphries may well be having the last laugh. A recent tally of box office receipts showed that "Sex Lives of the Potato Men" has grossed nearly $1.5 million since it opened, meaning that some people apparently appreciate its particular brand of humor. "It's been received by the critics in one way," said Tina McFarling, a Film Council spokeswoman, "and by the public in another way."