JONNY LEE MILLER IN MEAT


Meat

 

GREAT BRITAIN 1994

director: John Madden

producer: Martin Pope

director of photography: Richard Greatrex

screenplay: Daniel Boyle

editor: David P. Rees

music: Stephen Warbeck

main cast: Jonny Lee Miller, Sarah Jane Potts

running time: 90 mins

format: 35mm/1:1.66, colour

The main character, Charlie Dyce, has just been released from a juvenile detention centre. He'd been placed there after having broken into his school, not to steal anything but just to sit there in silence. Once released he leaves his home in Scotland and travels to London. He was not prepared for London's harsh reality and aggression. After starting work at a café, he meets Myra, a teenage prostitute, and Myra's pimp, Frank. Frank disapproves of Charlie and Myra's developing re-lationship, mostly because he's in love with Myra himself. He finds out that Myra is pregnant and reaps a cruel revenge on the couple. Charlie and Myra split up when Myra is forced into hospital, and Charlie reverts to a life of humiliation and prostitution.

The film is a Romeo and Juliet inspired story, set in London's hidden world, where unhappy failures parade in front of the camera with their anguish clearly visible. Charlie's initial in-nocence is parodical compared with the calculating and mendacious reality he meets in the big city. The only exception to the film's direct narrative style is a childhood memory which appears at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the film. Jonny Lee Miller, as Charlie, creates an impressive portrait of a character changing from introverted and lost, to hopeful lover, to angry and threatening, to degraded and broken. Apart from a certain affiliation to Mike Leigh's film Naked (1993), the film is similar to the politically aware films from the British movement Free Cinema, or kitchen-sink realism, from directors like Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson and Ken Loach. Meat is critical of society, a contemporary criticism who's explosive force is enhanced by it's concentration on a few main characters. The film concerns on an immediate level love's possibilities and/or impossibilities, about the worldly and social barriers which must be overcome by this young couple in order for them to be together. PS


 

© 2007 JonnyLeeMiller.co.uk. Proudly supporting JLM since 2nd Nov 1999