“Love Actually” revisited – love it! (2)
Some weeks ago, I did a blog posting about the 12 minute follow up to the film “Love Actually” which is being made for Red Nose Day on 24 March 2017. Today the “Guardian” newspaper has a report from the set of the mini sequel which includes this observation:
“[Hugh] Grant sips water and tries to catch his breath. He’s just shimmied his way around a bit of the set made up to look like 10 Downing Street, a grand marble staircase behind him hung with photographs of former prime ministers. His photo is among those on the wall, the actor today reprising his role as the Blair-ish PM who in the original film put aside duties of state to woo his secretary, played by Martine McCutcheon.
Such is the power of love in a Richard Curtis film that Grant had to dance out his romantic vigour by wiggling up and down the halls of Downing Street to a Girls Aloud song. There’s another dance in the sequel. As with most of the new scenes in Curtis’s followup, an incident or encounter from the first film is referenced, with some sort of twist catching us up on what has happened to the character, a decade and a half on.
Incredibly, in the idealised Curtisland of 2017, Grant’s fluent, moderate prime minister is still in power. It’s a bit of unashamed wishful thinking that’s heightened, on set, by the fact that the stairway photographs of real-life prime ministers include Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, but stop short of David Cameron and Theresa May, as if these premierships (and world financial collapse and austerity and referendums and dissolution) had never come to pass.”