The Null Device

MIFF: Pure

Tonight I went to see Pure, a film by Gillies MacKinnon (who also did Glaswegian tenement kitchen-sinker Small Faces and Kate Winslet art-house romp Hideous Kinky) about a 10-year-old boy in gritty East London and his heroin-addicted mother. The film was somewhere between Ken Loach's kitchen-sink social realism (particularly films like Kes) and Trainspotting; it had a touch of the pop-cultural sensibility of the latter (in a few visual effects), but was somewhat less light (though unlike many kitchen-sink films, it didn't offer a scathing indictment of capitalism/contemporary British society). The acting was excellent, especially from Canadian actress Molly Parker (she was the necrophiliac in Kissed some years back) who played the mother, struggling with heroin addiction. Meanwhile, Australian actor David Wenham (of The Boys) played the slimy wide-boy drug dealer/pimp, and up-and-coming actress Keira Knightley (she's in some Disney formula flick or something) played a teenaged prostitute. The musical score was by Nitin Sawhney, and alternated between traditional film-score territory (neo-classical synth-strings and pianos) and jungle/drum-&-bass-inspired beats. Well worth a look, if it gets local release (quite possible, because of the local-boy factor).

It was interesting to contrast the gritty, working-class East London in Pure, with its housing estates, drug addiction, teenage prostitutes and the mass ritual of the football match, with the almost Thatcherite upwardly-mobile neighbourhoods just a little further west in The Mother which I saw on the weekend.

There are 4 comments on "MIFF: Pure":

Posted by: Ben
http://leviathan.weblogs.com
Thu Jul 31 14:27:39 2003

I never saw the film of Kes, although I thought the book was pretty good for a kid's book (I think).

Did you get my email re that radiohead thief CD?

Posted by: acb
http://dev.null.org
Thu Jul 31 14:52:51 2003

I saw Kes at school; one of our bolshie pinko teachers showed it to us in English class.

And please keep your dodgy dealings outside of these public forums, or at least on topic.

Posted by: Ben
http://leviathan.weblogs.com
Thu Jul 31 20:06:39 2003

Pretty funny seeing as the topic here is drug abuse and child molesting movies.

Do you think Graham might be interested?

Posted by: dirK
http://
Fri Aug 1 03:12:08 2003

funny, i was thinking of Mike Leigh's All or Nothing and Jonas Åkerlund's Spun :D

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