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USA 1986
Directed by
Howard Deutch
96 minutes
Rated PG

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
2 stars

Pretty In Pink

Along with films such as The Breakfast Club (1985) and St Elmo’s Fire (1986) Pretty In Pink was one of the defining teen films of the mid-1980s. Written by John Hughes (who wrote and directed The Breakfast Club) it is a tiresomely sentimental essay on the awkwardness of teen years couched in a rich boy/poor girl opposition, that may have had some purchase in the decade of greed but which probably seems weirdly antiquated to the same teen demographic thirty years later.    

Molly Ringwald, who had been in both The Breakfast Club and Hughes’s earlier Sixteen Candles and was somewhat of an "it" girl in the day, plays Andie Walsh, a sweet young thing from the wrong side of the tracks with an independent sense of style who works in a record store (of course), and lives with her father (an oddly-cast Harry Dean Stanton looking like he’s just come from the set of Altman’s Fool For Love, 1985) who can’t get it together since his wife, Andie’s mother, left him. Andie has a scholarship to a prestigious high school where she meets rich kid Blane (Andrew McCarthy) much to the chagrin of her best friend Duckie (Jon Cryer), whilst Blane’s maliciously snobby friend, Steff (James Spader), is pressuring him to drop Andie for one of his own kind.

Whilst Hughes’s script is a formulaic realization of the familiar boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl etc scenario culminating in the all’s well prom night finale, as directed by Howard Deutch there is no credibility to the characters or the plot. Why is Dad still in some kind of existential funk three years later?; if he and Andie are so poor how come she drives a Karman Ghia, albeit a banged-up one?; if Andie and Duckie have been best friends since childhood how come he attends the same high school as she?; and why is James Spader, who was 25 at the time, still at high school?!!.

These aren’t questions you bother to ask as there is nothing really at stake in the film - it’s about the fashion, the self-conscious attitude, the chart hits. Or at least it was in the day. Now it's mainly an illustration of how truly awful fashions were in that transitional decade.  

 

 

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