Having a Wild Weekend

More road movie than rock movie, CATCH has a surprisingly mature, melancholy tone for a British beat picture. That it has any tone at all is a tribute to director Boorman, whose characteristic fusion of the mythic with the ordinary is already evident in this his first movie, and writer Peter Nichols, who imbues the surprisingly engaging supporting characters with a quality of personal yearning and need for escape that spans generations. Boorman's preoccupation with water, rigorous yet dreamlike use of landscape and tendency to celebrate or at least acknowledge the antiquated are just as vivid here as they are in HOPE AND GLORY. Too detailed and ambling to be anything but opaque or irrelevant on video, I suspect.