Thursday, February 25, 1993

Features

Two hours of a life sentence: Cinema
Geoff Brown

Leon the Pig Farmer, a British independent production, had no access to Hollywood-sized finances. The cast and crew worked on deferment, while the working budget was just Pounds 160,000, supplied by 40 investors. Yet its exuberance and polish makes much of Honeymoon look limp. Vadim Jean and Gary Sinyor, the young directors whose debut this is, clearly love the film medium, and they extract full value from every pound spent, every location visited.

Leon, their bemused hero (Mark Frankel), is a sensitive Jewish lad from north London who learns that he is a product of artificial insemination. Worse still, his biological father is a bluff Yorkshire pig farmer, played in rafters-ringing style by Brian Glover. Subtlety is not the film’s strongest suit, and the script’s silliness gets totally out of hand when Leon produces kosher livestock by injecting a pig with sheep’s semen. But, before this calamity, there is plenty here to enjoy, from the comic swipes at Jewish and gentile life (likely to upset only the most orthodox of souls) to the directors’ infectious joie de vivre.