"Metroland" (or "Metro-Land") is the name given to the affluent north-western suburbs of London served by the Metropolitan Line (originally the Metropolitan Railway). The name was first coined by the railway itself in 1915 as part of an advertising campaign; it was later popularised by the poet and architectural critic John Betjeman (himself a native of the area) and taken up by Julian Barnes who used it as the title of a novel.
Barnes's novel deals with the contrasting fortunes of Chris and Toni, two school-friends who grow up in the area during the 1960s and 1970s. As teenagers in the early sixties both boys are rebellious and dissatisfied with what they see as the predictable, conformist lives of their parents and the other members of the prosperous North London bourgeoisie. They dream of escaping from their safe, cosy world to somewhere more exciting, especially to Paris which they see as a city of rebellion and progressive, avant-garde ideas. (Actually, France under de Gaulle was probably at least as politically conservative and socially conformist as Britain under Macmillan and Douglas-Home, but then "a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest").
The film (which has a different structure to that of the book) opens in 1977 with Chris, now aged around 30, and his wife Marion living precisely the sort of life which the younger Chris had hoped to escape. He still lives in the Metroland suburb of Eastwood and commutes by tube every day to an office job in central London. In Barnes's novel the suburb (a fictional one) was called "Eastwick"; this was presumably changed to avoid any association with John Updike's "The Witches of Eastwick", but "Eastwood" was probably not the best alternative as there actually is a town of this name in Nottinghamshire.
Chris's quiet life is disrupted when Toni, whom he has not seen for around ten years, suddenly reappears. Toni is dismayed when he discovers that Chris has, as he puts it, "sold out" and adopted the bourgeois lifestyle he once rejected. In a flashback we discover that after leaving school Chris did indeed live for a time in Paris, where he had an affair with a French girl and tried to earn a living as a photographer. Although during this period he affected a contempt for all things English, he eventually returned to England after falling in love with Marion. (He met her when she was in Paris as a tourist). He still cherishes hopes of becoming an author, but his projected magnum opus is nothing more radical than a history of the London transport system.
In his review of the film Roger Ebert wrote that "the movie is not about whether Chris will remain faithful to Marion; it's about whether he chose the right life in the first place". It is some time since I read Barnes's novel, but from memory that question seems to have been more finely balanced in the book than it is here. In Adrian Hodges's screenplay Toni becomes a rather more sinister figure than he was in the book; motivated by an ideological dislike of marriage as an institution, he makes a concerted effort to wreck Chris's relationship with Marion. Toni describes the secret of happiness as "doing what you want, not what others want", but to me this sounds more like a recipe for self-centredness. For all his talk about the wickedness of the "bourgeoisie", Toni is not motivated by any real commitment to an ideology such as socialism, commitment to anything or anyone other than himself being foreign to his nature. Towards the end of the film he talks about going to live in California and becoming a screenwriter for Hollywood, without considering whether such a move might constitute an even greater sell-out to the capitalist system than Chris's suburban lifestyle. Pace Mr Ebert, I cannot accept that the movie is not about whether Chris will remain faithful to Marion; his love for Marion is the one thing which prevents him from becoming as self-centred as Toni.
The film does not deal with Chris and Toni's teenage years in as much detail as the book, and I felt it was a mistake to use the same actors to play them as boys; it would have been more convincing to use teenage actors. Christian Bale, however, is excellent in the main part of the film. He plays Chris as a man torn between nostalgia for the ideals of his youth and a sad realisation that those ideals were never really attainable in the first place. There is another excellent performance from Emily Watson- probably the best I have seen from her apart from "Hilary and Jackie"- as the sensible, practical Marion. Lee Ross is perhaps a bit one-dimensional as Toni, but then Toni is supposed to be one-dimensional, a teenage rebel of the week who cannot accept that his week ended about fifteen years ago.
The film deals with the perennial question of the conflict between youthful innocence and adult experience, a conflict which much have seemed particularly intense to those who came of age in the idealistic sixties and then had to face the very different world of the seventies and eighties. ("The Big Chill" from 1983 also dealt with the gradual disillusionment of the hippies-turned-yuppies of the sixties generation, in that case from an American perspective). At the end of this film Marion asks Chris if he is happy. His reply is "Happy—if not now, never". 7/10 A goof. I know that house prices were lower in real terms in the seventies than they are now, but even so I doubt if even in 1977 a 30-year-old officer worker like Chris could have afforded that massive four-or-five-bedroom detached house in the North London suburbs. He refers to a mortgage, so we know he did not inherit it from his parents.
