| 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
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