 A FilmExposed Film Review |
 Dir: Menhaj Huda, 2006, UK, 89 mins
Cast: Adam Deacon, Aml Ameen, Femi Oyeniran, Noel Clarke, Jaime Winstone
Ever wondered what it might be like to negotiate your adolescence growing up on a London estate, in fear of bullying and casual violence at school, swamped with drugs and then to have a grime and hip hop soundtrack document your every move? You could do a lot worse than watch this film. Tracing the lives of a group of teenagers including wannabe gangster Trife (Ameen), pretty, savvy slut Becky (Winstone), rapid fire wide boy Jay (Deacon) and the various run ins they have with psychopathic bully Sam (Clarke who also wrote the script) this authenticates the far from imaginary world of living off your wits in a run down world. The list of peripheral characters is rich and their interlocking lives culminate in a house party leavened with signposts to the night’s bloody and expected conclusion.
The dialogue is expertly crafted, capturing the teenagers in an endless flow of expletives, slang, and almost runic vernacular that passes by in a flurry of garbled understanding. The three main male characters, Trife, Jay and Moonie (Oyeniran) inhabit a frenetic world that bounces from drugs, to revenge, to premature ejaculation in the shape of a single scene. When they travel outside their manor for a trip “to Oxford Street” they inspire the worst kind of fear and prejudice in the closeted shop workers highlighting the different world in which this film is both documenting and supporting. Becky uses sex as a currency, ingests liberal amounts of drugs and mainly decides which man can best advance her need for retail dependency and pocket money. Sam (brilliantly played by Clarke) fumes with some injustice cracking a constant scowl throughout although not without farce especially when he arrives back at his bedroom to find Jay having sex with his girlfriend, Trife stealing his weed, and his mum bringing everyone tea and biscuits.
Thankfully not as stern as the recent Bullet Boy (2005) which dealt with a similar slice of the community, there is frequent evidence of comedic characterisation. Trife’s uncle, a huge lion of a black man, has a leopard skin wearing girlfriend straight out of an Eastenders acting class and larging it up for all she’s worth. White middle class males are roundly portrayed as either balding perverts or selfish businessmen. Taxi drivers are unwitting racists and at one point the only way Moonie can get a cab to stop for him is to send out Jay’s girlfriend as no-one stops for a lone black man wearing a garish tracksuit. Elements of the story are handled less successfully namely the standard themes of teenage suicide and pregnancy but this might easily be through genuine repetition of these topics in any dissection of ghetto London school life.
The soundtrack is integral, grime superstars like Lethal Bizzle, Sway, Shystie providing perfect backdrops to the action, although perhaps unsurprisingly the most effective is The Streets Stay Positive that perfectly segues into an impressive sequence that splits the screen between all main characters as they go about their business.
Flawed in a way that social commentators may well dismiss it out of ignorance, but as an attempt to place the verisimilitude of London teenage life on the screen Kidulthood is, at times, brilliantly successful. |
