Young people? One simply adores them. Club culture? One is simply mad for it. The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971? One simply laughs it to scorn as an absurd irrelevance – an attitude of life-affirming defiance in which one is naturally joined by one’s ”homies”.
I watched Human Traffic, the new movie about the British club scene by first-time director Justin Kerrigan, in a tolerant and elderly mood. This mood was composed of a thirtysomething’s appropriate humility in the face of this hymn of praise for youthful hedonism, combined with a growing and piquant sense that the on-screen participants themselves feel alienated, worrying that the whole scene is not what it was, or that they are not what they were, or that however young everyone is, a tiny voice is telling them, as Julie Burchill once told Johnny Rotten: ”You’re too old”.
Human Traffic is an enjoyable middleweight comedy about five clubbers larging it one weekend in Cardiff, screaming with excitement at each other, millimetres from each others’ noses. They live in Identikit manky teenage bedrooms covered in execrable posters. They include Jip, Lulu, Koop, Moff, names which sound like techno bleeps or cleft-palate yelps from the heart of a culture in which the avowed point is to get well and truly monged.
Jip is the central character, stuck in a crap job, yearning for Friday, worrying that habitual over-indulgence has made him permanently impotent, and secretly fancying Lulu. Koop sells vinyl, and is madly jealous whenever his girlfriend Nina so much as looks at another man. Their friend Moff is a hyperactive cockney superlad who sorts them out for Class A material, which they cheerfully consume in colossal amounts, with no ill effects to speak of other than a common or garden ”comedown” of the sitcom hangover sort. (This simple fact arguably makes this film more radical than Trainspotting, a comparison to which I shall return in a moment.)
We kick off with a montage of rave scenes, accompanied by Fatboy Slim’s Build It Up Tear It Down, interspersed with scenes of PC Plod repressively coming down like a ton of bricks on the young ravers. Thus are we implicitly invited to invest Human Traffic with a socio-political significance, a dimension which is, however, entirely absent from the rest of the picture. Justin Kerrigan has said of his film: ”It’s nothing like Trainspotting.” In the course of that sentence his nose has grown approximately 175 feet. There are differences, of course. Trainspotting was a gut-wrenchingly angry and despairing film about poverty, an oppositional film which was a product of John Major’s Britain, but whose unflinchingly bleak representation of drug use was sufficient for an obtuse Just Say No interpretation which earned it an endorsement from Mrs Virginia Bottomley.
Human Traffic, on the other hand, is well, I was going to say Trainspotting Lite, but that isn’t quite fair. It is distinctive: it is higher up the socio-economic scale of Blair’s Britain at the middle-class student loan level and really aspires only to replicate the euphoria of clubbing.
The unphotogenic business of buying, selling and ingesting drugs – the actual human traffic – is kept mostly out of shot. But in style, it feels very derivative, with lots of cheeky pieces to camera from its characters, freeze-frames, and twangily ironic voiceovers. Human Traffic, in its insouciant way, is a pro-drugs film. No one gets to climb out of a lavatory; there are no crisis scenes, no scenes in which four of them panickingly jog alongside the fifth on a trolley in a hospital corridor, with the doctor sternly asking if they are the patient’s ”friends”. There is no Leah Betts hysteria in this film. They do drugs; they have a fantastic time; that’s it. This is refreshingly honest. But it also makes for a strangely depthless film. Human Traffic is all surface. There is no real human drama or emotion, no sense in which the characters are importantly or interestingly changed by what they experience.
There’s quite a bit of funny stuff in the film. I don’t mean the ”fantasy” sketch scenes in which Jip re-imagines conversations and conventions to show what is really going on one joke repeated over and over. And I certainly don’t mean the cameo appearance from Howard ”Mr Smug” Marks. The humour comes when Kerrigan just lets the characters talk, revealing a charming and exotic comedy of language. Shaun Parkes is particularly good as Koop, trying to sell someone a dodgy 12-inch import by claiming it’s by a ”posse of crack heads on death row”.
Human Traffic has a lot going for it and deserves success. I just wish it wasn’t giving us so much fierce zeitgeist attitude, a suicidally quick way for a film to become dated and naff, like the gruesome ramraid drama Shopping. Sometimes it appears to strain as hard as Jip in bed with a girl, earnestly hoping for an erection. Just relax, I felt like saying, and it’ll happen …