Rotten Tomatoes recently visited the set of Franklyn, a quasi-futuristic flick I’ve mentioned here a couple times before, and they spoke to its director, Gerald McMorrow:
“Franklyn is basically about four intertwining stories, three of which are based in contemporary London and one of which is based in a kind of parallel fantasy environment called Meanwhile City,” he says (and this is where it gets confusing) “Our hero in that strand is this sort-of masked vigilante detective who’s the only atheist in Meanwhile City, played by Ryan Phillippe, who basically runs around trying to extract people from cults, has a big cynicism about the whole thing and hates The Ministry with a vengeance.”
Meanwhile City? The Ministry? “It’s this place which is sort-of run by a shadowy, religious uber-power called The Ministry who has decided, over the centuries, that as long as they can get their population to believe in something – anything – they can control them. People have faiths and religions based on strange things like The Seventh Day Manicurists and Washing Machine Street Preachers. Their doctrines and dogmas are all based on things like washing machine instructions.”
Right. So that’s one of the four strands explained, then. “The other three strands are in contemporary London. Eva Green plays Amelia who’s basically a much damaged, suicidal art student who’s drifting in and out of her video art installations involving cry-for-help suicide attempts. Then you have Sam Riley who plays Milo, and he’s probably much more normal and down-to-earth and he’s basically just been jilted at the altar. That promotes him to suddenly try and search for the purity of his first love. And then the fourth story belongs to Bernard Hill who plays Peter, a church warden in Cambridge who comes down to London to find his homeless son. And all four strands come together at the end.”
Of course, now that I have toddlers who watch the Treehouse channel whenever they get a chance, I cannot help but think of the theme song to this show whenever I see or hear this movie’s title.
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