From Cheshire to Cannes

It must surely rank as one of the more surreal films to get a screening at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, but a little bit of Cheshire will be touching down on the French Riviera this year. A romantic comedy by the name of Barefooting will be shown on Thursday 22 May exposing unto the world a less-than-amorous market town landscape that makes Northwich what it is today. And it’d be lying to suggest that in the pantheon of great film locations – Los Angeles, Rome, New York, London – Northwich will not be getting filmmakers queuing for the first train out of Euston station for what is essentially a halfway house between Manchester and Wrexham.

If filmmakers, however, are willing to become less reserved in this country about the places they want to show off, can we not think of places with slightly more allure than Northwich? Otherwise we may as well open ourselves up to ropey dramas set in Ashby-de-la-‘effing-Zouch or renegade spy dramas based in the suburban crawl of Slough. Ok, so Ali G Indahouse has already propagated the luscious Staines’ sprawl around the world but really, are we doing ourselves any favours with this. Most of our towns in this country are soulless copycat wastelands in the image of each other, replicating Starbucks, Natwest and Maccie D’s all the way down the High Street until you reach the out-of-town Tesco’s sitting proudly, defiant on a grey roundabout uniting the microcosmic worlds of Hemel Hempstead and Aylesbury. Who wants to watch a film set there when you can normally open your front door and be exposed to the whole monotony on a daily basis? At least with American films, there is some degree of aspiration involved – the remotest of Montana townships has an intriguing quality about it hardly replicated this side of the pond, bound by endless A-roads that lead to nowhere. Fun it ain’t.

It’s a contributing feature of why Americans make better impassioned music than the Brits – well, at least since 1978. They have tales to tell of day-long trips to get anywhere. When you leave London and travel the whole length of the M1 to arrive in Leeds, you’ve done that in three hours and where’s the story there? A crap cup of coffee from Newport Pagnell services? Good grief! Who would ever give a second thought to putting that on screen (said without contemplating that a random search of YouTube will probably throw up something along those lines)? It’s possible to appreciate the sentiment behind such decisions to open up every nook and cranny of the world for our delectation at the film house but is it truly necessary to? Maybe it’s just the anodyne state of the nation that speaks, but at the same time it’s not hard to find a worthier place to set a Brit-flick. Oxford, Cambridge, London, Cardiff… all cities with a distinct appeal in one way or another.

It makes no difference if you trawl market towns of the Shires, if the film was made by an American company actors would still affect the accent of either upper-class pomposity or the working-class cockney even if you set up shop in Salford. A case in point if ever there were one - for so many reasons. And as for Northwich, hopefully it’s just a small cameo appearance in an everlasting global procession of great filmmaking locations.