Wish You Were Here

With mother dead and father emotionally ditto, 16-year-old Linda (Lloyd) hungers for love with a foul-mouthed exhibitionism that horrifies the strait-laced elders of her '50s South Coast home town. More scandalously, after an initiation into the disappointments of sex with a silly young bus clippie, she takes to sleeping with the local fleapit's limp projectionist (Bell), one of her dad's masonic mates. For his writer/director debut, Leland filches a few incidents from the early life of Cynthia Payne to create a teenage rebel whose frustrations lead her to kick against the pricks of repressively status-conscious, middle class Britain, double standards and all. The trouble is that Lloyd's loud, brattish performance makes Linda less a socially purgative Free Spirit than a pain in the neck. More a well-meaning romp than a credible analysis of the state of the nation, now or then.