GRAET ESCAPES

“WE’VE GONE ON HOLIDAY BY MISTAKE”

In 1987’s Withnail and I (1), director Bruce Robinson subverts the traditional road movie. Rather than Route 66 or a vast expanse of the American mid-west, his two heroes point their seriously compromised Jaguar MkII up the M1 towards the Lake District and a derelict cottage. A pair of booze and drug-addled perpetually ‘resting’ actors, they’re escaping a London whose ability to swing at the fag end of the Sixties has atrophied into something much less limber. With one fading headlight and no wipers to speak of, Marwood (Paul McGann) wrestles the Jaguar through the rain while his friend falls into a fitful, drunken sleep.

Road movies often pit their protagonists against society’s expectations of them, or maybe they’re on the run from the law. Here, they’re on the run from themselves, the journey of self-discovery being the trickiest one of all. was produced by George Harrison’s Handmade Films, the former Beatle’s connections enabling him to secure another of the elements a road movie needs: the right soundtrack. Jimi