Krishna
The movie is interesting. Just when you think it has gone into a slumber when it seems to meander without direction, it picks up and goes off into another explosive phase. Which saves the movie from being marked as a slow, mediocre movie and makes it really one of the movies that I would recommend to people to see.
The story starts brilliantly enough. Jody, a British soldier (played by Forest Whitaker when, I presume, he was not as famous as he later became) is lured into a honeytrap by Jude (Miranda Richardson) and kidnapped and taken prisoner, with Maguire as an accomplice. They are IRA operatives and hope to exchange Jody for a few of the IRA men held by the British government. Jody realizes that one of the IRA men assigned to guard him, Fergus (played by Stephen Rea) is a kind man really and gets close to him, much to the dismay of others including Maguire, his superior in the IRA. When the plan fails, Fergus is asked to kill Jody and Jody starts to run, convinced that Fergus will not shoot him in the back. Fergus cannot do it but then the British soldiers launch an attack on the IRA hideout, accidentally killing Jody. Before he died, Jody had shown him a photograph of her girl, Dil, in London (brilliantly played by Jaye Davidson, later) and asks him to find her and tell her that Jody loves him, after Jody is dead. He gives the address of the hair salon where Dil works. (He is convinced that he will be killed by IRA since he has seen the faces of some of them including Fergus)
Many years later, Fergus lives in London as a building labourer under a new name, Jimmie, and after the hot trail of the British agency runs cold, goes to the salon mentioned by Jody to meet Dil. He meets her and follows her to a bar and then falls for her. She is in the clutches of an older but vile man who ill treats her, and Fergus rescues her and she falls for Fergus, without realizing that he knew Jody.
Here is where the movie started to sag but when they get really close and Fergus realizes that Dil is a man – a cross dresser with a woman’s mind, but certainly a man, the movie picks up pace. When the IRA tracks down Jimmie (Fergus) and when Fergus realizes that both Maguire and Jude are alive and well and threaten to kill Dil (who they think is his girlfriend) unless he carries out a hit for him, he panics. He then tries to hide Dil in a hotel and, meeting Jude, Dil suspects that it is Jimmie’s ex girlfriend, and the movie completely takes off at this point, with a tense climax and an interesting ending.
I was wondering how this will all end since Fergus aka Jimmie is straight and Dil is madly in love with him, but the ending is logical and interesting. The story of a scorpion and a toad told by the soldier Jody in the beginning also makes its appearance at the end, which is a very nice touch.
It is an interesting movie and the bartender Col played by Jim Broadbent is an interesting character as well. By the way, if you now see the unique mannerisms of his, you are instantly reminded of the Moulin Rouge, where he plays Harold Zidler a few years later.
Good movie and I would give it a 7/10 only because the middle still is not as taut as the beginning and the end.
— Krishna