Starring: Paul Kaye
Cert: 15
Released:27th May 2005
Charlie (Kaye) is the biggest DJ
in
Ibiza. He is revered by his contemporaries and
worshipped by the ravers. His success behind the decks puts him on the cover of
every trade magazine going and inevitably gets him signed to a record producer
and the release of a number one single and album.
He gets married to a Posh-a-like model wife and thoroughly immerses
himself into a hedonistic lifestyle of booze, drugs and sex.
Then he goes deaf and things start crashing down around him.
The storyline is anything but
original and the concept of a mega-star DJ seems a bit out of date to me (but
maybe that’s just because I’m getting old) but Pete Tong is great film.
For those who may not know, ‘Pete Tong’ is late twentieth century rhyming
slang for ‘wrong’ and the man is a successful Radio One and club DJ so you can
kind of presume that the film title came first and the content was filled in
afterwards.
It is filmed in a fly-on-the-wall documentary style, meshing the
day-to-day events of Charlie’s exuberant life with soundbites from his
associates and real professionals. Again, it’s a style that’s been done plenty
of times before and I think that’s what makes it such an easy film to watch; the
simplicity, the wobbly, hand-held camera style, the straight-playing actors and
celebrities’ input gives Pete Tong
that extra edge of realism and allows the laughs to come freely.
Paul Kaye is surprisingly good. Anyone remembering his Dennis Pennis days
(and don’t forget Blackball) may
think he’s too OTT to pull off proper acting that might require a degree of
sensitivity, self-control and creating an emotional and sympathetic connection
with the audience and, indeed, during his peak Charlie is a gregarious reveller,
larger than normal life and utterly hateful; then he falls into a
self-consuming, drug and alcohol mired psychosis making himself, in the first
case, a complete tosser and, in the second, a total nutter. But there are
moments of calm within the storm as Charlie desperately tries to deny what is
happening in and around him and Kaye shows that he can act ‘normal’.
Kaye’s supporting cast provide plenty of laughs too by being either as
quirky as him or so straight as to propel him further into absurdity.
Well worth watching if only for his drug induced hallucinations of a
rabid cocaine badger that looked like a cheap rip-off of Donnie
Darko.
