Young Adam

(David Mackenzie, Scotland, 2003)

I will probably not be the only Australian filmgoer to watch this excellent Scottish production and emerge wondering, 'why can't we make movies like this here?'.

For there is nothing ostentatious or extravagant about David Mackenzie's Young Adam. It is a modestly mounted but skilfully judged combination of a haunting story, expert performances and a thick, poetic atmosphere.

Mackenzie bravely courts comparison with a true screen masterpiece, Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934), when he begins with a barge containing the itinerant Joe (Ewan McGregor) and his sullen employers, Ella (Tilda Swinton) and her husband, Les (Peter Mullan). Like in Vigo's film, the claustrophobic space of the barge offers both an escape from society and a microcosm of it.

Joe and Ella continue having an affair whenever Les is not looking. But the unravelling of this situation disturbs Joe less than the surreal apparition that one day washes up against the barge: the corpse of Joe's ex-lover, Cathie (Emily Mortimer).

This is a superb adaptation of a novel by Alexander Trocchi, a cult figure associated with various artistic undergrounds and avant-gardes from the 1950s to the '80s. Although the film has little, on its surface, to do with the worlds of bohemia, drugs or experimental writing, it captures the profoundly unsettling, amoral mood of Trocchi's work – the sense that people, once set adrift from any stable notion of identity, are literally capable of anything.

This film is a shag-fest for McGregor. Joe experiences carnal lust for every woman he encounters and, it seems, the feeling is mutual. By around his third tryst with Ella, we have figured out that sex for Joe is a complex mixture of soulfulness and alienation.

But Mackenzie falters when he tries to encapsulate, in a few compressed flashbacks, the equally tortured relationship between Joe and Cathie – culminating in a luridly melodramatic scene where Joe covers her in custard and tomato sauce before violating her.

Not very much happens plot-wise in Young Adam, but Mackenzie's faith in the expressive power of glances, cryptic gestures and settings is admirable. He is immeasurably aided by his entire cast and a restrained score by David Byrne.

Although the film is not perfect, it marks Mackenzie as a director to watch – particularly as one of his forthcoming projects is another dive into the dark waters of Bohemian amorality, via the life of Velvet Underground singer Nico.

© Adrian Martin April 2005