16 Years of Alcohol

Co-founder of The Skids-turned-film critic Richard Jobson puts his ambition where his mouth is in a striking directorial debut.

Superficial comparisons to Trainspotting are inevitable (set in Edinburgh, starring Kevin McKidd and featuring Ewen Bremner in a tale of struggle against addiction) but the gentle mood, flourishes of Expressionist style, John Rhodes' luminous photography and a haunting piano score plant this firmly in art-house territory.

After witnessing his father's philandering, Frankie Mac (McKidd) grows into the hard-drinking leader of a gang of skinheads (with Jobson trowling on the visual references to A Clockwork Orange) until the love of a good woman gives him a way out. But redemption proves a big step and his aggressive paranoia ensures he's not out of woods yet.

The work of Chungking Express director Wong Kar-Wai, who encouraged this project, is a major influence and a mixed blessing for Jobson; he occasionally over-eggs his point too literally (a moment in which Frankie appears to have come full circle is unnecessarily overplayed with flashbacks to remind you why it's poignant) and McKidd's melancholy voice-over sometimes intrudes.

But these are small flaws in a passionate, poetic film about hope which makes a genuine attempt to find a unique cinematic voice and is powered by an awesome, committed and hugely credible performance from McKidd.

I was not expecting much from '16 Years of Alcohol'. Perhaps an overly sentimental look back at Scottish urban life, perhaps a neo-realist bleakness. But when it started with hypnotically beautiful images of Edinburgh and a voice-over in that recognisable cadence, with repeating cycles of words drawing out every ounce of meaning from clichés like "hope"... well, I knew that I was firmly in Richard Jobson territory, and that maybe he has always been a film-maker at heart. He skirts cliché while playing with it, trying to show the violence endemic in that society and making many references to other films ('Clockwork Orange', westerns, 'Trainspotting', Martin Scorsese, etc.). It is larger than life and demonstrates how the mythic archetypes shape the characters rather too small for the roles they want to adopt.

Kevin McKidd is brilliant as "Frankie", a character the amalgam of Jobson and his brother; I kept forgetting he was not in fact Jobson. The women are incredibly beautiful and yet have a depth of character not commonly seen in films that make women into such visual feasts. They are saviour archetypes but again somehow avoid cliché. How is Jobson doing this? There is some subtle artistry at work here. The cinematography is gorgeous and I was glad for the snippet of Skids on the soundtrack, though 'Love is the Drug' gets the best treatment in a scene that is both scary and hilarious.

The film is dedicated to Jobson's brother, who did not escape the life of alcohol and violence and was murdered a couple of years ago. In the post-film talk at the Dublin Film Festival, Jobson revealed he had in fact run with the most notoriously violent of Edinburgh's youth gangs, until Skids took him away from that. This is quite obviously a very personal film and yet a highly aestheticised interpretation as well.

I did not want the film to end, and would gladly have sat through it a second time immediately. Maybe it's just where I'm at in my life right now. Maybe it's because I have spent so many hours over the years infiltrated by Jobson's aesthetic. Maybe it's just a damned good film.

'16 Years of Alcohol' won Richard Jobson the award for Directorial Debut at the British Independent Film Awards. It has received glowing reviews from Time Out, The Guardian, and Sight and Sound. It has played at festivals the world over. Forget the dismal comments of those too cynical to enjoy real film-making. See this poetic triumph for yourself.

Films about alcohol are usually depressing. They rob all the enthusiasm for life one might have in just a few hours and leave you staring into the void at the end, wondering what the point was. It's difficult to catalog them in any way, because a good "alcoholics movie" is one which swiftly flows along certain psychological retinues and steadily builds up to a mammoth of self deprivation.

However, this isn't truly a film about alcohol. It's more a film about getting a life (yes, Trainspotting), portrayed in a less imaginative way. It all gravitates around love and the end is helplessly tragic, but "Sixteen Years of Alcohol" isn't that bad. Some sweet imagery and photography might make it worth your time. Also, the story resides within the soul of everyone who suffers due to lack of purpose, not only those subdued to the magic liquor. It's a borderline movie: you may very well dislike it, because the storyline is crap. Like all those films which fit into this part of the movie-specter, "Sixteen..." has good and bad parts. Just to name one, I want to recall the "Clockwork Orange" scenes, which are a homage-like rip-off, that barely prove a point. Moreover, those scenes feel terribly frustrating.

All in all, it's not too bad and it could hardly have been better. No one need to watch it, but everyone is invited. Check out the party. 6/10

I'm not a huge film buff but I went to see a screening of this film at the GFT in Glasgow on Monday and Richard Jobson was giving a Q & A afterwards.

Thought his answers to the audience were good and definitely helped make sense of the film a bit much. He made some really good points about the types of films coming out of Scotland these days and how he was trying to get away from that drab reality style we're used to seeing.

it's worth seeing anyway, I wouldn't write it off straight away.

Agreed, pretentious drivel, dull and impossible to care about! To me there were many, many problems with this film - the voiceover is very self-consciously attempting to be poetic but fails, most of the music is very irritating, loutish music for yobs not very popular even when originally released. The acting , Kevin McKidd's portrayal of Frankie is remarkably wooden for an actor that once showed such promise, how far he has fallen in such a short period of time. I suppose he suffered from poor direction, often the problem with a new and inexperienced director and producer afraid to keep his feet on the ground, pretentious aspirations have run riot, an attempt to make a "worthy" film, has unfortunately steered this ship on to the rocks of self indulgence. Agreed the story may be personal and minimal but in my opinion who should or could care about such ugly, cruel youths or their fates. I found my self almost immediately emotionally detached from all the characters though bored indifference. Comparisons to 'Ratcatcher' are truly laughable. Another film by a native of Edinburgh that made the Edinburgh Festival (historically automatic for any film ever made in Edinburgh) that also suffers from being shot on high definition for £450,000, for goodness sake with that amount of money the film could have easily been shot on superior 35mm film which would have made the film look much better rather than the 'Dogma' video looking quality print that I saw in Edinburgh, why do people working on tape always say that it looks so much like 35mm film, when to shoot on film would mean it would automatically look like film instead of automatically demoting the film to DVD/ Video sell through, because when projected the majority of cinema goers including myself hate paying to see washed out grainy, poor quality blown up video images. The direction will not move you I guarantee and as for the production values...who goes to see, rents or buys films for their production values? At the end of the day you pay your money to be entertained or moved and you will fail to receive either from this debut, sadly this film is pretentious drivel, the critics will slaughter it and the investors will loose their shirts, harsh but an economic truth. Yet another British embarrassment on its way to festivals guaranteed to be laughed at, with jaws dropped open in shock, by our American cousins.