From:
Category: Amis
Date: 6/29/99
Time: 1:08:09 PM
Remote Name: 130.159.44.62
From the Guardian
Ferdinand Dennis
Notting Hill offers a curiously outdated view of London. Made for the American market, it caters for that romantic Anglophile view of the place as that mono-cultural, mono-racial city beloved of American Wasps. This mythological city most certainly ain't the London, or the Notting Hill, that I know.
There are more cosmopolitan neighbourhoods in London than Notting Hill. Hackney, for example, but Hackney's poor, very poor. Notting Hill's wealth enables it to make vibrant declaration of its diversity - its Italianate Victorian villas, petite mews houses and council estates accommodate an astonishing variety of peoples from Spain, Italy, Ireland and especially the Caribbean.
Which is why it is unfortunate and perhaps unpardonable that Notting Hill, the film, has chosen to ignore the area's rich tapestry of cultures. Missing out the Moroccan cafes, the stalls on Portobello Road selling plantains and yams, and the Rastafarian record stores blasting out reggae is bad enough.
But it represents a huge failure of imagination to miss those two days in August when the neighbourhood celebrates its fantastic diversity in the Carnival - Europe's largest street festival - when rivers of every conceivable shade of dancing humanity flow through the streets. It is days like this that give the term global village real meaning, but there wasn't even a grudging acknowledgement of it in the story.
Instead it concentrated on characters who were too familiarly British, white and middle class. Movies like these fill you with a despair like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, who shouted, 'They can't see me!' Me, in this instance being peoples of colour without whom Notting Hill would be as bland as yesterday's salad.
Did they not read Samuel Selvon's Lonely Londoners or Colin MacInnes's Absolute Beginners or City Of Spades (an unfortunate title, I'll admit)? Even Martin Amis, in London Fields, and Hanif Kureishi, in London Kills Me, were not blind to the other Britain.
If I sound a little piqued by the film's failings, it's partly because I have an abiding affection for Notting Hill. It was my teenage playground. Many of the most significant moments of my youth happened in the hallowed few hundred yards between Portobello Road and Notting Hill Gate. I watched my first riot from the Westway flyover; during that carnival a voluptuous Caribbean woman rebuked me for being too English because I could not dance in the streets; the pub where I met a girl who blessed me with a summer of love and then disappeared on the autumn breeze; the secondhand record store where I worked for two summers and was introduced to Keith Jarrett's Koln concert by a gentle, bearded hippy.
The Notting Hill I have known is still there. Take a stroll down Portobello Road on any summer Saturday and you can't help but become a little intoxicated by the sheer beauty of the mixing peoples, a model of the future. If Britannia is trying to be cool, she must be seen in Notting Hill and Notting Hill must be seen in her. Sadly, the film-makers did not see it that way.
Americans, though, should love their Notting Hill for, like Shakespeare In Love - which at least had the excuse of history on its side - it's a movie more about their needs than the reality of London's dynamic cultural diversity.
• Ferdinand Dennis's latest novel, Dubby Conqueror, is out in Flamingo paperback on April 19 priced £6.99.