Cinema: Derek Malcolm
THERE have been plenty of films about the drug culture, almost all of them adopting a moral tone that liberals can conveniently call “responsible”. But there have been none quite like Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, adapted from Irvine Welsh’s novel.
The film, like the book and the play, shows the pleasure of drug-taking both for itself and for the joy of escaping for a time from the kind of life (“It’s all shite”) its characters are likely to have without it. By the end, we see the consequences of this choice. But it is easy also to imagine the consequences of any other choice.
It’s Edinburgh, where a hair-raising posse of boyos, led by Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), a young man with a “sincere and truthful drug habit”, attempt to escape the enormity of normality via a massive drugs deal.
It is filmed with a free style that doesn’t preclude surreal touches. The sequence when Renton grovels for the remains of his hit down a lavatory basin equates the nightmare in his brain with the physical state he’s in with grisly aptitude. All the characters are so recognisable that you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. You are asked to do both.
The film is not entirely uncompromised. Welsh’s ironic, all-embracing pessimism is sometimes missing; the language is less defiantly scabrous and there’s a musical score – Blur, Pulp, New Order and Primal Scream – that provides a fashionably Britpop adjunct.
Even so, this is an extraordinary achievement and a breakthrough British film acted out with a freedom of expression that’s often astonishing.
You could call it an anti-heritage British movie, except you can see a bit of Hogarth in it. Comedy, in fact, is a vital component as Renton, Ewen Bremner’s manic Spud, Johnny Lee Miller’s Sick Boy and Robert Carlyle’s psychotic Begbie pursue their way through a world they regard as terminally hostile to what little they hold dear.
These are not admirable figures, but they are flesh and blood. There are elements of caricature, but you see what’s happening to them and why.
Trainspotting will be showing in cinemas across Johannesburg and Durban from this Friday