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Between the Canals
| Released |
18 March 2011 |
| Director |
Mark O'Connor |
Starring
|
Peter Coonan, Dan Hyland, Stephen Jones, Damien Dempsey, Yare Michael Jegbefume |
| Writer(s) |
Mark O'Connor |
| Producer(s) |
Deirdre Barry |
| Origin |
Ireland |
| Running Time |
74 minutes |
| Genre |
Crime, drama |
| Rating |
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Between the scumbags.
This first thing that sends a chill down the spine about this film is the involvement of ‘singer’ Damien Dempsey. The self-appointed ‘Bard of Dubalin’ not only acts but contributes a couple of songs to the soundtrack. So right from the start we’re treated to the aural torture of his tone-deaf caterwauling. It doesn’t bode well for what’s to follow.
Set in Dublin’s inner city on St. Patrick’s Day, it opens with Dotsie (Peter Coonan) throwing a washing machine over the ledge of some flats down on a couple of Gardai. Just for the ‘craic’ like!! Dotsie’s pal Liam (Dan Hyland) wakes up late and hungover after drinking heavily after his uncle’s funeral. His uncle was a local crime figure and paid the price with his life.
Liam is having problems with Gemma (Anne Marie Martin) the mother of his child and his on/off girlfriend. She wants him to get out of the flats and the grim life of drug-dealing but Liam is torn between her and his friends. Liam meets up with Dotsie and seeing as it’s Paddy’s Day they go off to buy some cans at the shop where Dotsie has a run-in with some local kids.
Then they meet up with Dotsie’s cousin Scratcher (Stephen Jones) and they go to a local pool hall where they start a fight. This gets them on the bad side of the local crime boss Chambers, played by Dempsey in his acting debut. Going to the pub, Liam meets up with another, older crime boss and is offered a job as a drug courier. However the boss doesn’t want the volatile Dotsie involved and this causes a rift between the pair. Things get more dangerous as events spiral out of control.
First time writer-director Mark O’Connor is clearly a big fan of urban films like La Haine and Mean Streets and also the seminal TV series The Wire. The story pilfers every plotline from these sources that he can fit in. There’s the guy who wants to get out of the life of crime, but who is urged to take revenge for the death of a relative. There’s the wild and violent character who’s doomed, but who loves his granny (so that’s okay then). There’s a gun that’s found by a child, with grim consequences. The plotlines are so hackneyed and obvious that you can see the ending coming a mile off. In the end, O’Connor himself seems to lose interest in most of them too.
O’Connor tries to lighten the mood with a section where the trio deliver some cocaine to a group of gay Nigerians. It’s obviously an attempt at some sort of comic relief but it just comes across as some sort of bizarre pandering to an idea of a multi-cultural Dublin.
In the lead roles Peter Coonan does admittedly show some star quality as the volatile Dotsie. Stephen Jones provides some funny moments as Scratcher but Dan Hyland simply doesn’t have the acting ability to make Liam sympathetic in any way. In his first acting role, Damien Dempsey shows he isn’t quite as bad an actor as he is a singer, but it’s a close run thing.
Obviously most of the supporting cast are amateurs, a tactic Ken Loach often uses to get more authenticity. However it’s not enough just to throw locals in, you have to coax performances from them. They can’t just say their lines in a monotone voice like they’re reading them from a bit of cardboard held up behind the camera.
Ultimately though they biggest problem with the film is that it’s nearly impossible to sympathise with the main characters who are nearly all, frankly, horrible people. They’re the type of lowlifes who live to cause misery to other people in their community, getting their kicks from randomly abusing (physically or verbally) anyone they feel like.
No doubt there will be an opinion among the liberal middle class that these characters are themselves victims of poverty, making their behaviour understandable. Anyone who actually lives in a working class area and has to deal with these types of people every day will take a dim view of this argument which effectively lets these criminals off the hook for their actions.
There is a decent film to be made about the state of Dublin’s underclass but this isn’t it.
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Jim O’Connor |
