Dylan Harvey’s documentary commemorates Secret Backyard Get together, the boutique pageant in Abbots Ripton that ran from 2002 till 2017 – and which is returning later this yr. Offered you'll be able to abdomen the frequent outbreaks of self-satisfaction, there’s a number of entertaining footage and woozy anecdotes right here in a lord of misrule vein. Its USP (closely impressed by Burning Man) was that it was a celebration somewhat than a pageant; the onus was on attendees to dress up, caught in and grow to be a part of the spectacle, somewhat than a passive viewers.
It’s ironic, given the often-asserted iconoclasm of the occasion, that That Was a Severe Get together cleaves laborious to the staid talking-heads format, beginning with founder and “head gardener” Freddie Fellowes. Probably drained from 15 years of partying, the heads don’t work particularly laborious exploring the context. Claims of carrying the post-90s counterculture torch are made, however how does that sq. with their self-avowed “posh” clientele? Absolutely Fellowes, the son of Baron de Ramsey and outdated Etonian (details, in fact, not talked about), may solid some gentle – however he doesn’t go there. It’s not even acknowledged till two-thirds in the place Secret Backyard Get together occurred, and it’s no extra exact than, to paraphrase Jarvis, someplace in a subject in Cambridgeshire.
That Was a Severe Get together will get the spirit of the shindig over higher the extra it degenerates right into a collaged melee nearer to Julien Temple’s Glastonbury movie, full with mud-wrestling, Pete Loveday’s very good Crumb-esque drawings and an amusingly downbeat recollection about 5 burnt-out occasion casualties watching an inflatable champagne bottle circle a paddling pool.
There’s an attention-grabbing strand right here about Vito Neo Reargo, a perennial Backyard Get together denizen who evidently lived for the masquerades, however later killed himself; his story illuminates English pageant tradition as a folkloric escape from on a regular basis banality. Prosaic actuality appear to have lastly sapped Secret Backyard Get together, with Fellowes and workforce deciding to nix the occasion in 2017 earlier than it misplaced its anarchic purity. It’s again on this July to coincide with the discharge of this movie: proof each that Fellowes and co usually are not utterly resistant to industrial imperatives, and you can’t maintain a superb occasion down.
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