QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM MALTA
This is not a documentary. British folk act McGwyer Mortimer never existed. But you’d be forgiven for briefly assuming that they actually did. Tom Baden – who plays the cocky and cranky male half of the duo – is real-life musician (if a little-known one), and he performs his own (and fairly decent) songs here. It is Carey Mulligan’s familiar thespian face that makes it clear that the story isn’t real, and that the actors aren’t playing a fictionalised of themselves. The 2025 film is based on a screenplay by Basden and Timothy Key, an adaptation of the 2007 short film The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island (by the same pair of writing hands and director).
In James Griffiths’s sophomore feature film, fading folk music star Herb McGwyer arrives at the remote Wallis Island, off the Welsh coast, in order to perform a mysterious gig “for less than 100 people”. He meets event producer and superfan Charles (Tim Key). It soon turns out that the intended performance boasts from a massive crowd of just one person: the host himself. One is indeed “less than 100”, Charles argues accurately and assertivel. Herb isn’t impressed, but he’s persuaded to stay after Charles shows him a suitcase with his fee of £500,000 in cash. He gives him an advance payment of £50, leaving the remaining £499,950 for after the show.
Wallis Island is so small and isolated that there are no mooring facilities, and a perplexed Herb falls into the water just as Charles helps him off the boat. He loses communication with the real world after his mobile phone gets wet. He asks Charles for rice with the purpose of removing the water from inside the device. Charles finds only rice pudding at the local shop (the only further sight of human life on the island). An angry Herb explains that this will not serve to rescue his phone from imminent death. “Not with this attitude”, ascertains a far more optimistic Charles retorts.
To make it all worse, Charles has invited Nell Mortimer (Mulligan) to join Herb on “stage” (basically a loose plank on the beach). The problem is that the former music partners and lovers split up roughly a decade earlier, and Nell arrived in the company of her loving and understanding husband Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen). The host with the most is determined to get McGwyer and Mortimer together, in more ways than one even. He believes that they can only perform together if they rekindle their passion, a belief a very hesitant Herb seems to share with him. Perhaps that’s the only way to save his dwindling career from total collapse, while also helping Nell to pay her bills.
This is a subtle and gentle movie about passion for music, and how nostalgia can keep the flame of love alive. Romantic, artistic and platonic love. A music fan is indeed a platonic lover. Charles is profoundly infatuated with Herb, so much that he wishes to stay in the room and watch his idol change. This has nothing to do with same-sex attraction, but instead with unconditional artistic adoration. Charles wants to fossilise a not-so-distant past through music, and that’s for a heartbreaking reason revealed more or less halfway through this 100-minute film.
This British film is structured like a romcom, with all the devices in the right place. Except that the romance is replaced with a bromance between Herb and Charles (making it a “bromcom”). The cheesy and pleasant tunes, the lovable characters, the awkward moments, the sweet little jokes, the meet cute (when Charles accidentally drops Herb into the water, upon his arrival) and the light bulb moment (which I cannot reveal without spoiling the story) – all of these ingredients are both discernible and tasty. To be enjoyed with an open heart, an attentive ear, and an empty stomach.
The Ballad of Wallis Island showed in the 3rd Mediterrane Film Festival, in Malta.
