Twenty-One

Twenty-One gets tangled in that eternal creative knot: how to tell a story about callow, young searchers without, in turn, erecting a structure that echoes all the same problems as your initial subjects. Twenty-One brings no new approaches or insights to the situation but neither does it crash and burn. This British film focuses on the life and loves of a 21-year-old woman named Katie (Kensit). She's presented as a representative model of what coming of age in the confused decade of the 1990s is like for an average girl. Katie speaks directly to the camera in a straight-ahead confessional style. The camera follows her into the bathroom and the bedroom in what promises to be an extremely intimate portrait. Problem is that what she ends up exposing is not terribly revealing, at least not in the spiritual sense. This modern woman claims that all she really wants is straightforward sex (but her words belie her actions which indicate that she's also looking for some emotional connection and warmth). In a flashback narration, Katie tells us the story of the four men in her life: her father, a sweet but inattentive husband who must share some of the blame for his wife's infidelity; Jack, a randy barrister whom she sleeps with but doesn't love (he tried to seduce her during his own wedding celebration); Baldie, a Jamaican singer who is her best friend and with whom she shares a platonic relationship; and Bobby, her doomed live-in junkie boyfriend who is unable to reciprocate Katie's emotional and sexual desires. The sum total of these four guys doesn't even equal one good man, so our Katie hightails it off into the direction of the Statue of Liberty (which she is visually framed with at both the beginning and end of the movie). The primary thing Twenty-One has going for it is Patsy Kensit (Absolute Beginners, Lethal Weapon 2). She has a fresh-faced, girl-next-door look while simultaneouisly casting an exquisitely photogenic come-hither spell. This movie is hers and hers alone. While she is one the screen (which is constantly) she makes what would otherwise be a myopic study of a modern gal into an appealing sensory treat.