Beats ***
Dir: Brian Welsh. With: Cristian Ortega, Lorn Macdonald, Laura
Fraser, Stephen McCole. 101 mins. Cert: 18
Back in 1999, that Britfilm upstart Human Traffic – born of the same creative big bang that begat both Trainspotting and Kevin and Perry Go Large – caught the tail end of rave culture. Two
decades on, Beats offers a more
considered return to the same scene, composed by cooler, wiser heads in artful
silvery-greys, with contextualising clips of Tony Blair outlining his vision
for a new Britain, after which it all plainly went a bit Pete Tong. Nostalgic
flashbacks are guaranteed for a certain demographic, but the delivery system
struggles to overcome a curious absence of the era’s biggest beats (were there
licensing issues?) and some perversely cramped framing. For a good while,
writer Kieran Hurley (adapting his 2012 play) and director Brian Welsh seem
determined to fashion kitchen-sink drama from one of the most outdoorsy of
youth phenomena.
One limitation is that the film’s energies are almost
exclusively focused on a cosily familiar odd-couple bromance. We join cowed
middle-class hero Johnno (Cristian Ortega) as he and his nervy mother Alison
(Laura Fraser) are being installed in a newbuild home-slash-prison on the
outskirts of an unidentified Scots town by a policeman stepfather (Brian
Ferguson), in part to keep the lad away from his wayward dafty pal Spanner
(Lorn Macdonald). The scenes in which these two naïfs fall in with an
underwritten older crowd remain stubbornly theatrical, stranding us amid
abandoned warehouses and damp toilet blocks; Welsh, who made 2010’s appreciably
Loachian In Our Name, is setting a
particular, unpromising scene here, but for at least half its running time, Beats is all oppression, no euphoria.
We finally get somewhere with the pair’s escape to the rave of their dreams, but Hurley’s thesis that all external tensions were forgotten about on the dancefloor, while historically verifiable, isn’t the smartest line for a movie to hold to: an already somewhat shambling romp slackens around its middle, and it requires armed police to break up the blissed-out imagery and give Hurley some kind of ending. A handful of transient highs remain – not least the fading memories preserved in Benjamin Kracun’s cinematography and Ortega’s doleful resting face, Welsh’s most reliable sight gag – but it’s more amiable than funny or especially persuasive. Set them against Mia Hansen-Løve’s resonant French house drama Eden or our own Michael Winterbottom’s kaleidoscopic 24 Hour Party People, and these beats sound ever so slightly tinny.
Beats opens in selected cinemas from today.
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