Better Things

Three times i've seen this without being able to write about it. Watching it feels as painful as the pain its trying to show.

"It hurts when we love somebody. Because loving is a painful thing. That is its nature. Our loving is hurting us" reads dumpy adolescent Gail (what is the book? My guess is R D Laing)

"Love hurts" is the over-riding (sometimes overbearing) theme of the film. The thematic treatment supplants any kind of plot or through-run story.

Therefore condense drama to concentrate emotion: still the life, compose the frame, minimalise the dialogue. No panning or tracking or moving off with camera. Stay still. Be here. With this that hurts. The effect is to feel oppressively overloaded on monochromal, monotonal, misery.

This is all stylistically engaging. Racing in the car fast down a dark country lane; all the sound is cut except for the 2 boys talking – like being immersed inside the bubble of them, cut off from the outside, focused right in to the heart of their isolation.

Better Things is relentlessly, almost - courageously - grim. A lot of very miserable face going on. Faces without smiles, without warmth, lacking, unwarmed by love. Faces of lads are all so null and void its hard to distinguish one from the other.

All is shadow and blue inertia, with very little light to provide contrast.

This isn't so much about the perils of doing drugs. It's about how difficult it is to love when love feels out of reach. Deprived of love, life disappears, becomes denuded – gets gloomily unbearable. Seems to be the message.

Disturbingly, the setting isn't inner-city London, Manchester – but the least place you'd expect to see urban anomie and alienation, – the supposedly "lovely" Costwolds.

I'll be saving this film. Doubt I'll want to watch it another 3 times though.

I found this film was more about love than drugs and depression. She say's 'why did she think falling in love would make things better' etc etc. When someone dies and you know you could have stopped or hindered them except that you would have done the same in their circumstances 'it hurts' it's the nature of love to understand yet still grieve. The film has old people in it, any one else notice that? He loves her even though she cheated on him, he can't escape because he loves her, yet his love for her rips him to shreds, all he wants is to be with her, to have what he thought they always had. the guy who overdoses is suffering the same pain, he wants what they had always had before she died, no matter how awful it was, at least they had something. Old and young, we just want what we had before it turned sour. Nothing to do with drugs or adultery just people wanting what they perceived as good. Well done, I loved the film.

I feel that this is a well executed film. In the film there is a real sense of desperation, loss and despair, and I feel that this is accentuated in the way that it is shot and also the music that is used. A sense of reality features very prominently within the film and although there isn't much in common with me and any of the characters, I find myself feeling sorry for them but also getting angry at the same time with some of them over the drug use. I actually felt quite shell shocked at the end, not because of the ending or the drug use but because there was lots going on within the film. Everyone had their own little narrative, which was neatly woven into the main theme of the film. I liked the monologue from the girl at the beginning of the film and also how we came back to it at the end. Overall an interesting film and as I say in my summary could have been a little shorter.

Its a pity that some of the dialogue is almost blasted out by trying to keep the real-life noise of passing cars or wind - probably done in an artistic way to represent something, but its annoying! its a pity as the acting is pretty much superb from a no-name cast... but the film is overlong and dwells too much on miserable looking people looking miserable...understandable given some of the topics, but... I think it is supposed to be as much about love and relationships overcoming events and anxieties... but it stretches itself pretty thin by the end

The photographer and filmmaker Duwne Hopkins' Better things is rather ironically titled: its people are hardly moving toward improvement in their bleak lives, though they might like to. They live in a marginal community in the English Cotswolds that seems to be dominated by adolescents and old people. All of them are either depressed, or addicted to drugs, or just old, run down, idle, or lost. Most are desperately hoping for love, but unable to find it. Hopkins, who has made some celebrated short films on related topics, is a native of the area and is careful to use local people, including former drug addicts. Faces seem harshly real, light is sculpted, landscape panoramas are dark and painterly.

The shock here is that we're in the lovely English countryside, but it's full of urban problems: poverty, unemployment, drug addiction. There is no Hollywood glamor or Trainspotting wild style about these young addicts. The eye is poetic but the stories are sociological realism.

A young woman named Tess (Emma Cooper) dies of an overdose, and those who remain don't seem better off, with a few exceptions: an estranged old couple gradually becomes reconciled, a girl overcomes her fear of leaving her room, and the boyfriend screws up the courage to visit the dead girl's mother.

That boyfriend, Rob (Liam McIlfatrick), as well as David (Che Corr) and Jon (Freddie Cunliffe) all did heroin with Tess, although David, due to the influence of girlfriend Sarah (Tara Ballard), is half-heartedly trying to stop. Rob is struggling, not least with his inability to attend Tess's funeral because of his complicity in her death. Jon's grandfather (Frank Bench) is released from the hospital and when he returns home--in some of the bleakest scenes of marital shutdown ever filmed--avoids his poor old wife (Betty Bench). His anger is never explained, but he does eventually let it go. Tess's friend Gail (Rachel McIntyre) missed the funeral because she has become phobic about leaving her room. Her grandmother (Patricia Loveland) has a hard time getting her to get up in the morning. She is taking a new medication, a therapist or social worker makes a home visit, and she improves after a look at the stormy fields and trees outside with her failing "nan." The plot lines include 18 characters. As one reviewer has noted, the three young male leads are hard to tell apart; and so are some of the names. The meandering sequences tend to seem random, even when artificially linked by sound or image.

Despite the integrity, something is missing--perhaps just stylistic restraint. Blue-tinted, carefully planned images of inertia are jarred awake by abrupt shock editing in which cross-cutting of similar moments and shifts from silence to noise are used a little too freely. I began to think the film would have worked better if the main stories had been followed through in separate sections instead of shuffled together--if, in short, Hopkins had worked in a simpler documentary style, let characters and scenes play out, and made space for more motivation and movement than simply waiting to score or racing at breakneck speed on a country road. The stylistically overwrought manner doesn't allow sequences and characters to breathe and detracts from the authenticity of the content, which, however mired in stasis, seems richly textured. There is a talent here that is at war with itself.

Shown in March 2009 as part of the Film Comment Selects series at Lincoln Center, New York.