Rough
and Tumble
by Chris Dashiell

Sweet Sixteen. It sounds like one of those teen comedies that seems to come out every week these days. But this is a film by Ken Loach, the veteran English director who has spent his career making films about poor and working class people, and often about youth trapped in the spiral of generational poverty.

It's about a boy named Liam, living in the slums of a west Scotland town. Liam knows that his mother, doing a six- month term in jail, took the rap for her drug dealer boyfriend. To get even, he and his best friend steal the boyfriend's heroin stash and sell it on the street themselves. Besides revenge, the goal is for Liam to make enough money to buy a trailer for his mom when she gets, which is scheduled close to his 16th birthday. In their heroin scam, the boys tread on the turf of the local gangster, who decides to take Liam into his organization. As he gets pulled into this more adult world of crime, Liam can no longer turn back, still focusing desperately on helping his mother while his choices become more limited, and more perilous.

Loach's gritty, documentary-type style brings the lives of these slum kids vividly to life. The story, by Paul Laverty, is realistic, touching, and quite humorous at times. Liam is played by a newcomer named Martin Compston, who has a beguiling half-smile coupled with a toughness that seems somehow endearing rather than threatening. It's a remarkable, subtle performance, with openness and warmth visibly battling with bitterness and mistrust. He seems to change before our eyes, growing from child to man, but with the child still hurting inside the man. The other performances are also fine, especially William Ruane as Liam's mixed-up friend Pinball.

Loach is true to the way teens in a lower-class milieu would behave - the constant joking and swearing, the casual brutality and hiding of feelings, the signals of loyalty and camaraderie just under the surface. The Scottish accents are so thick that subtitles were added to the film - which is a good thing, because otherwise I would have barely understood a word.

Liam's harsh world is full of hopes, struggles, and disappointments. We see his strengths, admire his remarkable endurance, even though we know he's going down the wrong road. Although he will have to wake up from his daydream to a reality he never anticipated, the film doesn't judge him, but looks on with compassion. Sweet Sixteen shows the experience of young people on the margins as dramatic, powerful, and worthy of respect, unlike the teen fare that the title ironically evokes.

In contrast, the well-meaning Bend It Like Beckham tries so hard to be cute, hip, funny, touching, and whatnot, that I found myself recoiling from the syrupy onslaught. It's about an English girl of Indian heritage (is there a shorter way of saying that?) who plays on a girls' soccer team against the wishes of her Sikh parents. There are lots of inspirational moments in which inspirational music plays on the soundtrack (one of my pet peeves - movies that rely on pop songs to do the work of action and dialogue), and the heroine encounters one obstacle after another, until things turn out just as you would expect.

The whole thing seems blatantly modeled on Billy Elliot, right down to the gay friend, except that Billy Elliot had a style. The style of Beckham's director, Gurinder Chadha, is to overplay everything like a TV sitcom in order to pummel the audience into submission. Juliet Stevenson is trapped in the film's worst role, as the idiotically timorous mother of the heroine's best friend (Keira Knightley), a cartoon foil for the script's laudable but incredibly clumsy critique of traditional femininity.

This is one of those small pictures that has become a cross-over hit. Its message, about the need for girls to define themselves apart from the expectations of parents, and its focus on the Indian experience in England, has hit a responsive chord. Parminder K. Nagra is appealing as the main character. Jonathan Rhys-Myers plays a hunky, sensitive coach and love interest. He gives the role all he's got, and he's the best thing in the movie. Would that it were enough. Bend It Like Beckham has more heart than most of the trash passing for entertainment on summer screens, but the script and the direction could have used some brains to help the heart along. It's hard for me to enjoy myself when someone's yelling "Enjoy! Enjoy" in my ear for two hours.

©2003 Chris Dashiell
CineScene