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Small Faces
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As
a Scottish film, Small Faces is –
like Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996)
– something of a stylistic hybrid.
Again
we start off, as in any good miserabilist UK movie, right down in the dumps.
It's Glasgow 1968, and everything looks hard and cruel. But very soon we are
alerted to something unique in this portrait. Two teenage brothers, Lex (Iain
Robertson) and Bobby (Steven Duffy),
exude more than the usual urban menace, despair or repression: they’re actually
sensitive, funny guys, and they have a passionate interest in art.
Between
Lex and Bobby is the third boy of the Maclean family clan, Alan (Joe McFadden).
He’s a more familar generic type: the sullen head-case given to fits of
violence and paranoiac shifts of loyalty. The mean streets these brothers
negotiate are ruled by youth gangs and fierce territorial divides; getting out
of this milieu in one piece is clearly not going to be easy for anyone.
With
these elements of art and male sensitivity on one side and violent gang warfare
on the other, Small Faces is set to
explore its hybrid style. Prolific director Gillies MacKinnon comes up with a
more daring and varied mix than Trainspotting,
although this is not half as sensational a film.
Small Faces displays a vivid lyricism that recalls tough, French teen movies such as Travolta et moi (1994) or Wild
Reeds (1994). These wired-up youths break into an art gallery and
tear past the Old Masters on the wall, like they did in Leos Carax’s great Les Amants du
Pont-Neuf (1991) or, further back, Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part (1964). And the figure of
young Joanne (Laura Fraser) resembles those pretty teens of French cinema who
are possessed by one powerful man and desperately desired by every other, less
powerful guy.
On
the USA-influenced side, Small Faces exhibits a high-spirited, fast-edited air of hi-jinx, a style that imbues even
the most horrifying events with a thrilling, amoral air. We see elaborate power
games and ruses played out between petty gang members; these intrigues evoke,
on a reduced scale, the urban criminal worlds of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) or Boaz Yakin’s Fresh (1994).
Small Faces eventually revs up to melodramatic intensity in order to resolve the dilemmas
of its trapped, haunted characters. On this plane it made me think of an
Australian precedent, the films of Geoffrey Wright, like Lover Boy (1989) and Metal Skin (1995). Wright's movies sometimes
go wrong, and Small Faces likewise
goes wonky, becoming overwrought and hysterical the more it aims for strong
catharsis and Big Dramatic Statement.
But
that's ultimately a small objection. Small
Faces is impressive and absorbing. Its energy never flags, and its ragged,
streetwise characters – especially Lex – are a winning, thoroughly recognisable
mixture of charm, bluff, anxiety and pure adrenalin.
MORE MacKinnon: Hideous Kinky © Adrian Martin October 1996 |
