The Riot Club
Go! It's a...Riot.
Good old-fashioned posho-bashing.
It’s been a rough old time for the Conservatives recently. A bunch of rowdy Scots stuck a boot into their brand of Westminster politics with 45% voting to leave the union; their Em-Pees have been defecting to the less posh but increasingly popular UKIP; and one of their lot got in trouble when he found his wee worm caught in Twitter’s beak. With all that going on, you may have started to feel a little bit sorry for them. But then they announce their intention to abolish human rights and that feeling quickly subsides. The Riot Club has therefore come at a good time for anyone who fancies peeling back the purple velvet veil to peer into the types of places where they put the “effing” into “the effing Tories”, and the “Prime Minister” into 10 Downing Street.
The Riot Club is set in an exclusionary Oxford University society, which is undeniably similar to the real-life Bullingdon Club attended by Tory Party hierarchy David Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne in their respectively rambunctious youths. Based on the play Posh, director Lone Scherfig (An Education) rides through the heavily-wooded setting and ably chases down the foxy storyline of debauched and arrogant behaviour. With her shotgun fully loaded with “bants”, before you know it (chichook-BANG!; chichook-BANG!) you’ll soon be feasting at her gluttonous post-hunt banquet, packed full of drama. Beginning with an enticing, fairly harmless and bemusing celebration of unhinged elitism, Scherfig soon takes us into pitiful mockery of the power-hungry protagonists and to the ultimate conclusion of grotesque and skin-crawling condemnation.
With unnervingly realistic, chiselled-cheek-boned, and toffee-talking characters, there really is a lot to chew on here. Even if the script and behaviour portrayed do seem overdone at times, it is nonetheless easy to believe that certain people do probably indulge in such, “mate, mate, mate - oh my, wow!” mega-bants and, “total bloody legend” antics on such a full-time basis that this is genuinely how they would consistently appear. As the events play out (admittedly fairly predictably), this makes the whole thing a bit uncomfortable to watch at times, and you will probably be compelled to put your hands to your mouth more than once to prevent your intense cringing from making your entire face fall off.
With unnervingly realistic, chiselled-cheek-boned, and toffee-talking characters, there really is a lot to chew on here. Even if the script and behaviour portrayed do seem overdone at times, it is nonetheless easy to believe that certain people do probably indulge in such, “mate, mate, mate - oh my, wow!” mega-bants and, “total bloody legend” antics on such a full-time basis that this is genuinely how they would consistently appear. As the events play out (admittedly fairly predictably), this makes the whole thing a bit uncomfortable to watch at times, and you will probably be compelled to put your hands to your mouth more than once to prevent your intense cringing from making your entire face fall off.
Through the gaps in your fingers, what you will see are the imagined effects of elitism (rather than poshness) made extreme in order to challenge our perceptions about how impactful it might be on British life, from top to bottom. Through all of the amusing and enjoyably dark fiction of the film, it makes an interesting point; a point which is rarely raised on cinema screens and is welcome considering how big an issue elitism is in politics and day-to-day life. If you allow it to, it might just make you look a little more cynically at our wealthy, smooth-faced leaders, which is no bad thing.
So go, get yo’ posh on and have fun seeing how the other half live. Embrace it, or have distaste for it – either way – The Riot Club is an entertaining and intriguing watch.
So go, get yo’ posh on and have fun seeing how the other half live. Embrace it, or have distaste for it – either way – The Riot Club is an entertaining and intriguing watch.
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