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NEW FILM
Are the kids all right?
Do you know where your kids are? Because if the new
British film Kidulthood is to be believed, they're almost certainly
beating someone senseless at a bus stop, trading in small firearms, or
having unsafe sex in exchange for drug money. And filming it all on a
mobile phone, of course.
Written by 30-year-old TV and theatre actor Noel
Clarke, and directed by first-timer Menhaj Huda, Kidulthood is a
frenetic, punchy homegrown take on the kids-run-wild moral-panic movie.
Deploying the sort of compressed time frame that habitually permits
Agent Jack Bauer to save the world six times before breakfast, the film
packs a dizzying range of debaucheries into one short day, which has
been granted as an impromptu holiday for the pupils of a rough London
comprehensive after the suicide of one of their classmates.
The small matter of a death doesn't break up the
party: girls trade on their bodies, boys make free with their fists, and
no-one does their homework. If this school was to seek trust status
under Mr Blair's new education bill, the obvious business partner would
be the local crack house.
The Sun has already made noises about a ban (which
won't hurt the film's fortunes one bit) – but is the content of
Kidulthood really so new or shocking? Though the drugs, the slang and
the fashions are different, Kidulthood calls up the same emblems of
youthful lawlessness that have fed filmgoers' appetites since the 1940s:
teen pregnancy, crime, cynicism, lack of respect for authority. The
press pack for the film consists largely of press clippings about
bullying, drugs, truancy and violence, to amp up the raw-and-relevant
feel.
Back in 1943, the poster for the bluntly-titled
American B-flick Where Are Your Children? bore a mass of shock-horror
headlines: "Increase in juvenile delinquency alarms nation", "Young
girls missing", "Young thrill seekers endanger the nation". Girls under
21, released the following year, came with the unforgettably histrionic
tagline "They start by stealing a lipstick – finish with a slaying!"
Literature and films about juvenile delinquency became
a positive plague in America by the 1950s, by tapping into a lucrative
combination of prurience and fear (and employing a lot of evocative
illustrations of angry young women in tight sweaters). "Teenage terror
torn from today's headlines!" screamed the poster for Rebel Without a
Cause, released in 1955. In the UK, meanwhile, social problem films such
as Good Time Girl, The Blue Lamp and Brighton Rock fretted over the
behaviour and treatment of disillusioned post-war youth.
The teens-in-trouble theme has since become a
preoccupation of world independent cinema, from Badlands in 1973 to
Heathers in 1989 and La Haine in 1995. That year also saw the release of
Larry Clark's notorious Kids, which will make an appropriate neighbour
for Kidulthood in the alphabetical cinema guides of the future. City of
God, to which Kidulthood has been earnestly compared, found a glowering
beauty in the aimlessly violent lives of junior Brazilian gang members,
and became one of the most acclaimed films of the early-21st century.
The Sundance film festival – always a reliable repository of films on a
young-and-restless theme – bristled with edgy, foulmouthed tales of teen
rebellion this year: showy examples included Dido Montiel's A Guide to
Recognising your Saints and Nick Cassavetes's Alpha Dog.
At its best, Kidulthood shares the force, frankness
and energy of the best of these films. La Haine, with its sharp dialogue
and pressure-cooker time frame, is a particularly obvious reference
point. The bleak picture that Kidulthood paints, however, renders it a
touch self-defeating. I'll admit to wondering part of the way through
why on earth I should care about the fortunes of such resolutely
feckless and self-seeking little scamps.
Noel Clarke's script evades political sermonising; it
doesn't emphasise deprivation as a cause of delinquency, and is in fact
fairly insistent about the cross-class nature of the bad behaviour on
show. The middle-class parents are marked out as the most complacent and
uncaring of all. In one scene, a girl alone in her bedroom with her
boyfriend is counselled through the door to "use a condom!" by a blase
mother who little realises that her child is in fact about to be beaten
up.
The problem is that the film's histrionics have no
particular focus. If teachers and parents are wrong whatever they do,
and kids go off the rails whatever opportunities are presented to them,
the whole project inevitably becomes a somewhat nihilistic one – give or
take some frenzied last-reel moralising. There's considerable irony in
the fact that Kidulthood showcases such strong work from very young
performers (including Rafe Spall and Jaime Winstone, offspring of
Timothy and Ray respectively) – real teenagers clearly capable of
working together with dedication, skill and insight.
The film gives no indication of just how such
admirable creatures might emerge from this modern morass of meaningless
sex and random violence. Then again, there's every indication that the
social group studied here has a very different take on the kind of
outrages shown on the screen. I saw the film with a number of bona fide
teens, and they greeted each "happy slapping" with gleeful hooting and
applause. What looks like tragedy to sheltered grown-ups seemed to play
like wry comedy – or even kitsch – to these "kidults".
While the immediacy and verve of Kidulthood is in no
doubt, that laughter suggests that its effectiveness as either social
comment or moral scaremongering is more than a little doubtful.
HANNAH McGILL
6 March 2006
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/57286-print.shtml
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