No is a rogue spitfire of a girl who takes no s**t from anyone, but she clearly has a soft spot for the old nutter, despite wondering if his intentions toward her are other than appropriate. She looks after him, but at arm’s length. When he tries to convince her to go home to her family, her own story comes out.
“…there are emotional moments of pure gold between them, but that does not stop the film being pretentious…”
Ken expounds at length about film and television, a pop-culture guru circa the ’80s and ’90s. The film is loaded with long drunken screeds about movies he loves, lessons he’s taken from them, and the joy of re-living a film by telling it to someone else (we’ve all been there). However, that’s the sort of thing we expect to write, not to see in the narrative context of a film. Ken needs a good, no-nonsense editor, and this would have been a much shorter film. Much more subliminally, the film contains countless references to songs and bands…and I’m not nearly cool enough to have caught them all. Much of Ken’s dialog is in the form of song lyrics (the title of the film comes from The Sisters of Mercy collection Some Girls Wander by Mistake, which they cribbed from a Leonard Cohen song).
The two actors are startlingly good performers, and there are emotional moments of pure gold between them, but that does not stop the film being pretentious, the constant pop media references are distracting, and it’s easily 40 minutes, perhaps even an hour too long.
Possibly there’s an audience for a long, dense, monochromatic ramble about life’s vicissitudes by two people scraping along the bottom of society. Watch the film and find out if it’s you.
"…the sad, sometimes sordid tales of how they came to be homeless are reeled out"
