He even appears in front of his attackers in a stairwell, as if by magic - having been left face down on the gravel behind them just a moment before. But it's a dream he pursues with fanatical determination, getting regularly beaten senseless by his competitors: there's an extraordinary sequence where Liam is left unconscious by three drug-dealers, yet keeps rearing up like the Terminator. But the only way he can afford it is to steal Stan's heroin and sell it himself, undercutting the opposition, with the aid of his supremely dodgy mate Pinball (William Ruane), whose only talent is for stealing expensive cars.Ĭompston's Liam is heart-rendingly naive in his assumption that once he has got enough drugs money, he can abandon the trade and live with his mother in a vaguely imagined bucolic bliss in this caravan. 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.
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