Wonderland (1999) on Netflix
Three London sisters face a Guy Fawkes Night weekend. Nadia looks for love through personal ads, Debbie raises her son Jack, and pregnant Molly's husband Eddie has quit his job in secret.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.1/104,384 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes63%
Trailer
Plot summary
Bill and Eileen's three grown daughters live separate lives in London. Nadia, a waitress in a Soho coffee house, spends her free time on blind dates set up through personal ads, and the men she meets disappoint her. Her sister Debbie, who cuts hair, is bringing up her eleven-year-old son Jack with almost no help from the boy's father, Dan. Molly, the third sister, is pregnant; her husband Eddie has walked out of his job and has not told her. Their parents barely speak to one another and have heard nothing from their eldest son Darren since he moved away. Franklin, a regular at the coffee house, cannot bring himself to speak to Nadia.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Wonderland (1999)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Michael Winterbottom shot with time-lapse photography to accelerate the characters' movement, an effect he said was inspired by Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express and gave an impressionistic feeling, "a rush of poignant colors and noise"; other footage used grainy hand-held 16mm cameras for a realist feel.
- Scenes of Dan taking his son to a football match were filmed at Selhurst Park, Crystal Palace's ground, during a real 1-1 draw against Birmingham City on 6 February 1999.
- Winterbottom said the script began in a similar way to Short Cuts, with the connections between the stories "purely down to geography", but it was rewritten so that "the story of one sister tells you something about the other two".
- The sex scenes are realistic and awkward: the one between Nadia and Tim has no music, which highlights the sounds of kissing and rustling. A small crew worked with only natural lighting and no sound boom.
- A pub scene was shot with real people in the background near closing time, and the café where Nadia works is a real small café in Soho.
