Liam has a big idea for a surprise for when she gets out, a date that almost coincides with his 16th birthday: he will buy his mum a caravan, with its own permanent pitch overlooking the Clyde. Non-Scots audiences will have to pay attention to catch what everyone's saying, though, and there are actually subtitles for the first 15 minutes - after which everyone is assumed to have got the hang of it.Ĭompston plays Liam, who lives with his cantankerous grandfather and abusive drug-dealing stepfather Stan (Gary McCormack), waiting for his mother Jean (Michelle Coulter) to be released from prison. Loach, as it happens, has discovered his own authentic star: the non-professional teenager Martin Compston, who takes to the camera like a natural without ever appearing to be acting. It's very different from the comically hyperactive world of, say, Danny Boyle's Trainspotting, with its riffing voiceovers, set pieces and stars. Loach's social-realist drama, written by his longtime collaborator Paul Laverty, is a distinctive, piercingly serious vision. Yet there's sweetness of a sort, an elusive sort, to be found in his tremendously powerful, occasionally grimly humorous new movie, set in the wretched estates of Greenock, where boys and girls of all ages are to be found mortgaging their existences for tenner-bags of smack. And as adjectives go, the one in this title couldn't be more ironic. Maybe not much has changed in this director's vision, except to get worse, because not much has changed in the unfashionable things he wants to make films about.
In this one, 33 years later, Liam's mum timidly asks him how his schoolwork is going and everyone just laughs. In that film, back in 1969, school was important. What a long time ago it seems that David Bradley's Billy was on the Kes posters and paperback covers, flicking us a good old-fashioned British V-sign. Chased out by the publican, they give him - and us, and anyone who wants to know - the finger, American-style. T he hero of Ken Loach's new film is Liam, a lairy young lad a few weeks shy of his 16th birthday, caught with his friend Pinball selling contraband fags in a pub, without reference to HM customs and excise.
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