NEDs

Peter Mullans film NEDs is the story of a young man growing up in the 70's, it shows the brutal nature of growing up in poverty, or at least a stark Work Class environment, in the tough urban landscape of the schemes in and around Glasgow. In the early 80's my family moved to the West of Scotland into a suburb commuter town outside Glasgow and therefore much of this film resonates with images from my childhood. While I didn't live in a Scheme, I was warned off of mixing with NEDs (Non Educated Delinquents, there is some debate about if the acronym or the appellation came first) but from school I knew people like John McGill (played with a wonderful understated assurance by Conor McCarron) and his mates, I could also recognize Julian, his rich friend, and I'm sure Mullan had some of the same teachers I had in school.

I have a weird relationship to violence in films, when I'm watching a film I am, no matter how engrossed I become in the plot, watching a piece of fiction and rarely involves any actual harm. So as a liberal person I tend to find myself defending violence, even ultra violent in any medium as a valid expression of an artistic viewpoint, but I often get turned off films with realistic violent because . . . well . . . I don't like violence. So normally I wouldn't go to see a film like this but it my hometown, my people. I felt I had to see it almost as an act of solidarity, not just to the sentiments expressed but to seeing that more film are made here in Scotland, with Scottish casts and crews. I wasn't buying a cinema ticket I was investing in cinema and film making here.

Although I had bought a ticket and was planning on sitting through it in all, I wasn't really looking forward to it. In my head it was going to be a stylistic, vainglorious celebration of the mindless violence I spend my days avoiding in the street. The wonderful reviews it had been receiving since it debuted in Toronto couldn't seem to dent my bubble of misillusion.

Because it does feature a lot of violence but none of it is celebrated, by the time Johns begins to revel in his decent into the violence around him, everyone in the audience is sitting, just routing for his redemption. We know what he is up against, what he can overcome and what is dragging him down, Peter Mullen shows that there is violence always there, just bubbling under the surface, but then so is salvation. Often John McGill just needs to reach out and everything could be different. This tightrope walk that the character is on drives the film and when he slips at the start of the third act the audience tumbles with him.

Nearly everyone I've spoken too has had issues with the final part of the film, yes it let reality slip away into a looking glass phantasm where you are no longer sure if we are in the real world or in John head. I'm not sure how I feel about all the weirdness that happens but I don know I ended up feeling like it ended too soon, that I wasn't real sure I wanted to stop hanging out with these guys; I like them and I wanted closure, but I've said it before sometimes in real life you don't get all the lose ends tied up. I like it when the director gives me all the pieces and lets me make of it what I want, makes me feel intelligent and involved in a dialogue with the creatives behind the medium.

Even if I was too Chicken to ask a question at the Q&A after the showing.