Small Faces

Small Faces stands out as an unsentimental and unpatronising glimpse of the life of 1960s working class youth in Glasgow. The film is directed with a light touch and brilliantly conveys the experience of growing up in the slums with the stereotypical escape-routes of gangs, drink and education. In refusing to romanticise its subject matter the film is bleak, funny, brutal and life-affirming all at the same time.

I caught this film late night on the Sundance channel. It is extraordinarily well done. It's good to see more and more cinema from the UK showing on cable here in the US.

Small Faces doesn't insult your intelligence, and it doesn't have any affectations. Its setting in the 60s is almost incidental; as someone else mentioned, there's no attempt here to glorify or overstate the setting for stylistic reasons.

And I must say, some of the camera-work is beautiful. One shot in particular stands out; Lex stands in a large vacant lot, puddles reflecting the sky, near the Tongs' apartment building. Something in this shot is alternately so deliberately composed for its "ugly beauty" and at the same time completely unpretentious and real and necessary. The kid who plays the lead, Iain Robertson, does an incredible job and seems almost an inorganic part of the urban wreckage around him.

No clichés. No insult to your intelligence. Just a story, well told, superbly acted, and superbly shot. This film is a textbook on how to make a good drama. Just one of many superb films from the UK (another recent good one was The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner) that we've been deprived of over here until now.

First rate.

The gifted Scottish director Gillies MacKinnon made this wonderfully fresh film about growing up in Glasgow in the late sixties and which he co-wrote with his brother Billy. It has the same feel for time and place and what it's like to be a teenager in a slightly idealized, hyper-realist past but it's an altogether more kinetic work full of great visual flourishes.

It centres on the three Maclean brothers, the deeply troubled, almost psychopathic Bobby who is a member of one of two rival gangs, (J S Duffy), Adam who is a talented artist hoping to go to Art School, (Joe McFadden) and the youngest Lex, who like Adam also has a talent for art but who also fosters some of Bobby's rebellious spirit (Iain Robertson). When Lex accidentally shoots a member of the rival gang in the eye, the boys find themselves caught up, in an almost surrealist fashion, in the conflict which turns very nasty indeed. MacKinnon may be dealing with such conventional issues as gang warfare but he treats the material in ways movies haven't done before. Adults, such as the boy's mother, (beautifully played by Clare Higgins), remain very much on the fringe.

This is a violent, darkly funny but mostly tragic film and the performances from the mostly young cast are extraordinary, in particular from J S Duffy and Iain Robertson and from Garry Sweeney as the vicious leader of Bobby's gang. The film wasn't widely circulated or seen and consequently was not a commercial success yet it remains one of the key British films of the past 10 years.

In late-1960s Glasgow, three teenage brothers from a fatherless home in a lower working class neighborhood struggle to survive among the chaos and violence that is part of their subculture. The oldest has serious mental problems and a learning disability associated with his acting out. The middle brother tries to steer clear of it all as he struggles to pursue his artistic talent. And the story is told from the viewpoint of Lex, the 13-year-old, whose childish delinquency becomes serious business when he is forced into adult situations. At the beginning I had difficulty with the heavy Scottish dialect and had some confusion of characters and events, but I was drawn in by the progression of events and the development of the characters. This is a poignant coming-of-age story that rewards us if we stay with it.

Life in the tough end of Glasgow in the late 1960s is delightfully and sometimes painfully presented here. This is clearly a work of well-observed autobiography by the Mackinnon family - Billy the writer/producer and Gillies the director.

At the centre of the film is the Maclean family - widowed mother with sons Bobby (none too bright), Alan (budding artist in spite of being brought up in the tough end of Govan) and narrator Lex, only 13 and still not sure what life is all about. Iain Robertson's performance as Lex is so good that it is barely credible that he has not reappeared in anything more worthy of his acting talent.

The film sets up a series of oppositions - gangs (Glens versus Tongs); romantic family life vs tough and unromantic street life; loyalty vs betrayal. Far from resulting in simplification, this actually makes the life of young Lex even more complex as he is, sequentially, drawn to each aspect of these opposing ideas.

Director Gillies shows he knows how to film his environment and gives us telling and memorable images - such as a huge close-up of blood running down a plug-hole that looks like some work of abstract art.

Nowhere near as clichéd as most coming-of-age movies, this is a joy for teenagers and adults alike.