| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 12/26/2010 : 19:56:31
Peter Mullan's latest directorial triumph is kind of like a Glaswegian version of This Is England. It's quirky and bleak and honest, and has a central performance by the very talented Conor McCarron as John McGill.
Well, everyone's pretty fucking fine, actually - and I'm swearing because if you don't fucking like it, don't fucking see the fucking film. If youse fucking ken what I fucking mean.
We first meet McCarron's younger self as the unusally intelligent son of an abusive drunken father (Mullan himself), and a caring mother who's also looking after John's younger sister, and trying to keep tabs on his tearaway older brother Benny.
John's relentlessly bullied at school and by roaming gangs of restless, aimless boys determined to make up in violence what they lack in deportment and etiquette skills. It's the early 1970s. Need I say more.
At first John learns to keep his mouth shut in the face of fury, then finds satisfaction that his brother's pals will sort out anyone who dares lay a pinky on him.
Still a high achiever scholastically, he's got that much further to fall when the system lets him down and he learns that teachers and so-called figures of authority can also be bullies.
So the film tracks John's journey to why fucking bother, plunging him deeply into the kind of madness that a certain Travis Bickle epitomises.
When social consistency has all the solidity of slush, no wonder John dissolves into the dirt. And I warn you, it gets pretty brutal before some final hope descends. And that may be illusory.
Mullan has such a sure hand on the tiller that you have to stay with him, even though what you want to do is run far, far away and pretend these things didn't happen then and don't happen now.
You might allow yourself to ask why. If not, the film will tell you to fuck right off.
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