*aYoung Jesse Peretz's debut feature (he has experience in music videos and shorts), First Love, Last Rites, is based on a short story by Ian McEwan. Right off, it suffers from the expansion of 10 pages to 93 minutes of film, and from...

A Forensic/Toast Films production. Produced by Scott Macauley, Robin O'Hara Herbert Beigel. Executive producers, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, Amanda Temple. Directed by Jesse Peretz. Screenplay, David Ryan, Peretz, based on the short story by Ian McEwan. Camera (color) Tom Richmond; editor, James Lyons; music,...

First Love, Last Rites oozes with talent as wayward, original and firm in vision as anything since [Jean] Rhys's early novels about being alone and young in Paris and London. McEwan's characters are adolescents; they bristle with the sudden violent consciousness of selfhood like hatching pupae. Or they are children, prematurely burdened with egos that give them the wizened gravity of infants in Renaissance paintings. Or they are men whose bodies have grown but whose minds have never broken fre...

First Love, Last Rites [is] possibly the most brilliantly perverse and sinister batch of short stories to come out of England since Angus Wilson's The Wrong Set thirty years ago. Unlike Wilson, McEwan is not concerned with the teeth-baring of vicious little snobberies in an exhausted, class-ridden society; the England of his fiction is beyond all that—a flat, rubble-strewn wasteland, populated by freaks and reclusive monsters, most of them articulate enough to tell their own stories with mesme...

In the black humour of McEwan's stories [in First Love, Last Rites] sometimes the blackness predominates, sometimes the humour. He can even be blackly Rabelaisian…. Always he is inventive, stylish and keenly observant of grotesque detail. He drives his plots logically to the most absurd or violent but, from his premises, inevitable ends. A brilliant and devastating début. (pp. 112-13)

John Mellors, in London Magazine (© London Magazine 1975), August/September, 1975. ...