|
Sweet Sixteen
Directed by Ken Loach
Starring: Martin Compston, Michelle Coulter, Annmarie Fulton, William Ruane
Running Time: 1:46
Country: UK
Year: 2002
|
|
After the railroad war in The navigators, Ken Loach returns with Sweet Sixteen, a film about the war on drugs with some of his favorite themes in the background: the share of humanity that fights in a world filled with difficulties. But this time, he places only one principal character in the center of his account: a constrained teenager befriends thugs to reunite his family. Not surprisingly, this is a typical Loach film.
Greenock, a harbor city not far from Glasgow, has been moribund since the closing of the shipyards. Liam, a young hooligan with a big heart, lives the expedients with his pal Pinball. Together they resell cigarettes in pubs. But Liam hopes for more. He cherishes the dream of offering a real home to his sister and mother, who will leave prison the night before his 16th birthday, far from misery and violence in which the city bathes. He steals a cargo of heroin from his mother's boyfriend and goes out with his acolyte Pinball to deal dope, before being spotted by the local kingpin. The infernal gears of trouble are thus set in motion.
Sweet Sixteen gathers themes dear to Ken Loach. An exploded family unit, with a locked up mother unable to educate her children, an absent father, a girl raising a child alone, and a son left to his own devices. Always tender towards people of few means, the director even cast amateurs, the majority of whom acted for the first time in front of a camera. Starting with Martin Compston (Liam), recruited in a local college. He impresses by living his character completely: sweet, fundamentally kind, he can be violent and doesn't retreat in front of the fear caused by the stones that are obstacles on the road leading to his dreams. The plot is built around Liam's mother, another nonprofessional actress. In real life Michelle Coulter is employed in a center that assists drug addicts. Unlike her two children, Chantelle and Liam, she adopts an immature and irresponsible behavior. The brother and sister, obliged to take over, reinforce the links that unite them in adversity. As always, it is in these moments of complicity, compassion and solidarity that Loach excels. He manages to communicate to the audience the energy of despair that animates his heroes caught up despite themselves in a spiral that takes them unrelentingly lower.
Sweet Sixteen is grounded in Scotland's current reality. According to a report, the proportion of minor parents is the highest in Europe, and approximately 100,000 children are victims of abuse in their own homes. A lucid witness of his time and contemporaries, Ken Loach, with his fourth collaboration with screenwriter Paul Laverty (a former lawyer from Glasgow), deliver an opus faithful to his fights, with the knowing mix of tenderness, despair and courage facing the blows dealt by fate. A film that continues in the vein of his earlier works.
Moland Fengkov
 Looking for Eric
The wind that shakes the Barley
|
Copyright ©1998-2017 LA PLUME NOIRE All rights reserved.
|
|
Sweet Sixteen review
