Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  The entire movie is building up to one golden moment, though. The Hesses know what they’ve got here, because they keep giving us teasing glimpses through Napoleon’s bedroom door as he practices.

  Pedro has run for the school election and had no idea that he had to do a ‘skit’. His popular girl rival Summer Wheatley has just done a rubbish but game choreographed dance routine with her posse of girlfriends. It’s left to Napoleon to rescue Pedro’s honour. He runs onstage and dances to ‘Canned Heat’ by Jamiroquai.

  Where do I begin with this towering scene of heartbreaking heartbreak? The joke is that everything Napoleon has done up to this point has been comically inept. So, as the music begins, we, like the watching audience, are expecting a car crash. And then Napoleon dances so beautifully it’s almost moving. It’s a bravura mix of hip hop street dance, Saturday Night Fever disco, acrobatics, ’80s Footloose style, and something uniquely Jon Heder, because, as well as taking his dance completely seriously, and despite the brilliance of the steps, Napoleon still doesn’t look quite right. The idea of the hapless goofball finding the one thing that makes him special, and it being the last thing one could possibly expect, gives the scene both comedy and poignancy, and is matched in inspired dance weirdness only by the Flashdance scene in Dogtooth (see here)

  The standing ovation Napoleon receives from his schoolmates probably explains why it is often said that this movie has an ‘uplifting’ ending. This would imply that logical stuff happens, to, like, be uplifted from. It doesn’t. It’s just stupid.

  Don’t switch off at the credits, though, or you’ll miss Kip’s wedding to African-American Goddess Lafawndruh, which includes the greatest love song ever written and Napoleon riding in on a wild honeymoon stallion he has tamed especially for the occasion. Lucky!

  HARD CANDY

  2005

  Starring: Patrick Wilson, Ellen Page

  Dir.: David Slade

  Plot: Juno The Paedophile Slayer.

  Key line: ‘I am every little girl you ever watched, touched, hurt, screwed, killed.’

  Low-budget American thriller Hard Candy is both a two-hander and a two-parter. Although other actors do appear onscreen, this is essentially a 96-minute acting face-off between future Juno (see here) and Inception star Ellen Page and the underrated Patrick Wilson. But it also deals with its controversial subject matter by taking the unsuspecting viewer down two diametrically opposed paths.

  In the first act of the movie, we watch a man groom a 14-year-old for sex. He is better looking and more charming than our natural image of the child molester. She is pretty and smart, but ingenuous and impressed, as we know teenage girls can be by worldly men who appear to take an adolescent girl’s opinions and tastes seriously; our skin crawls at the revelation of how easy it can be for a monster to destroy innocence, and for 20 minutes we’re screaming for her to understand that she’s out of her depth, playing with a sexuality she isn’t old enough to understand yet, and to make a break for it, now, like the wind, for the nearest policeman, or chainsaw.

  But, as we’re told early on, faces can lie. And in Act Two, male viewers are suddenly enduring their worst nightmare. Because we have been watching a predator at work. But we’ve been looking at the wrong face.

  Budding director David Slade was searching for the kind of idea that could be largely shot in one interior space to save money. He had come up with a few, but the one that stuck with him derived, as they so often do, from a newspaper. It was a report on a new Japanese phenomenon, whereby teenage girls track down paedophiles online, virtually flirt, allow themselves to be groomed, invite the sucker round. When he arrives he finds himself ambushed by a mob of girls who assault, batter and mug him.

  You can see why the idea stuck. On the simple level, you get the ‘what if the victim is really the predator?’ real-life plot twist. But on the deeper, more disturbing level: are these girls amoral thugs or crusaders for justice? Do we cheer the karmic retribution or worry for the mental health of children who can conspire in such an act? Is this righteous revenge or just crime?

  Slade approached playwright Brian Nelson who, being a huge fan of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, turned out to be the ideal choice. Nelson nails a story that could, potentially, be a nasty post-Saw trivialisation of a crime that destroys lives daily. It’s full of tricksy plot twists, violence and thriller dynamics. But, through strong characterisation and a firm grip on the politics of crime and punishment, it remains serious and thought-provoking. And gives us one of those post-Ripley, post-Buffy, ass-kicking heroines that is believable enough to exist outside of the fevered fantasies of sci-fi-flavoured porn geeks.

  Wilson is excellent. His Jeff Kohlver is a selfless portrayal of the man none of us wants to be. In the early scenes, he is a deft mix of easy-going charm and patronising sleaze. When not concentrating on manipulating his prey, his face relaxes, ever-so-slightly, into a face made cruel by depravity, but so briefly and subtly that his character never tips over into cinematic evil. For the film to work Jeff has to be the truth: that is, a guy you’ve met, not a hideously ugly, sweaty perv with CHILD MOLESTER stamped on his neanderthal brow. Later, when he’s in peril, you feel every fibre of his terror, and this is vital too, because Hard Candy constantly questions our attitude to retribution. It asks: ‘How many times have you felt that child abuse is the one area where you suspend your liberal values? How many times have you thought, “Just lock them up for ever. Or kill them. Or chop their balls off. They deserve it.” Well . . . here it is. The rough justice you want. So now you’re actually seeing what you wish for, how do you feel?’

  Wilson’s performance is nuanced enough that you lurch in and out of sympathy with his situation. At crucial points of the movie you start to doubt that Jeff is what Hayley insists that he is. This would be just one of the problems with both vigilante action and state-sponsored violence, especially in a world where an angry mob of the linguistically challenged gathers to attack a paediatrician, as actually happened, in the UK, back in 2000.

  But Page is on some awesome next-level shit. She’s an 18-year-old actress pretending to be a 14-year-old avenging angel and evil genius, pretending to be a 14-year-old jailbait intellectual. This is akin to attempting to improve health care while arguing with insane Republicans, balancing an obscene budget deficit and patting your head while rubbing your tummy. But she’s faultless. I mean, faultless. She implicates you with her tomboy sexiness. She convinces you that she’s desperate for an older lover even while the director is giving you big clues that she isn’t. She then convinces you that she’s capable of psychopathic levels of sadism. She makes a plot that inevitably trips into Sleuth-style daftness feel logical, just as Sarah Michele Geller does throughout Buffy, and even pulls off a Little Red Riding Hood metaphor and a gag about girl scouts. Her Hayley is a creation every bit as compelling as her Juno, and, although most of me wants her to go on and become the biggest movie actress of her day, another small part of me wants her to be scuppered by Hollywood sexism so she can come to TV and make seven seasons-worth of Hayley kicking paedophile ass so we don’t have to. In every generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the paedos, the nonces and the forces of darkness. She is . . . Ellen motherfucking Page!

  Now . . . you may have noticed that I’m kind of avoiding the details of the plot. That’s because I’m troubled. A few readers of Popcorn put the point quite forcibly that they didn’t approve of the entries where I chose not to discuss key plot-points and endings, from the not unreasonable standpoint that a film can’t be analysed properly without a wee bit of spoiling. And I got their point. But Hard Candy, though profitable on its tiny budget and admired enough to be Page’s big break, wasn’t seen by millions, and I’m going to assume that most readers have never seen it. And so much of the joy (and pain) of this movie is in the twists and surprises. And I’ve already let slip that Hayley is not what she seems and that she doesn’t die. I just really want people to see this movie and suspect that they wo
n’t if I spill every detail.

  But here’s what I can get away with in all conscience. Hayley has chosen Jeff because he is a photographer of under-age models who she believes has molested and killed a missing girl called Donna Mauer. When the pair meet, Hayley manipulates Jeff into taking her to his home, even though both constantly refer to the risks involved and how an observer might see the situation.

  She drugs his drink and he passes out. He wakes up tied to a chair. She accuses and he protests his innocence. She searches the house and fucks with his head with brazen, bracing wit: ‘Did society make me a vindictive little bitch, or was I born that way? I go back and forth on that.’ The things in the house, which looks like the kind of designer yuppie mansion you see in upmarket car ads, drive the situation: an indoor rock garden, a gun, saran wrap, a stash of porn, a bag of ice. He tries to escape. He fails. The book in Hayley’s bag that Jeff had spotted earlier is, as she explained, a medical book. It details a specific medical procedure. The ice is meant as anaesthetic. Hayley’s smart and she thinks she’s smart enough to perform a successful castration. And she wants to film it so Jeff can watch . . .

  That’s it. Can’t say any more except that that’s where the . . . um . . . fun begins. The castration scene is almost as physically painful and morbidly compelling as the final act of Takashi Miike’s 1999 movie Audition, which shares a theme about apparently submissive girls turning the tables on the men who want to use them. But there is a black humour here that is not on Audition’s brutal agenda, because Hayley talks so much, and is just wickedly, cruelly, gleefully funny, with a particularly great store of choice knob gags. She says everything we’ve ever wanted to say to a paedophile, and so much more. She wants to break Jeff’s mind more than his body.

  And that’s all he wrote. Watch this movie. It’s the bloody birth of a star.

  KIDULTHOOD

  2006

  Starring: Ami Ameen, Red Madrell, Noel Clarke, Adam Deacon, Femi Oyeniran, Jamie Winstone, Cornell John

  Dir.: Menhaj Huda

  Plot: Liberal-baiting grime in wild Notting Hill.

  Key line: ‘I wouldn’t want that in me. If I was you I’d rip it out with a coat-hanger.’

  The opening ten minutes of this extraordinary British film are, for me, the most frightening anywhere in this book. Nothing in any of the teen horror or gangster movies – or the sensationally graphic trawls through the lives of drug-addled American youth – freaks me out as much. This isn’t because it’s instantly familiar either – I had a few rough times at my London schools, but nothing to write home or to you about. It’s because it’s brilliantly scripted, acted and shot terror about something that everyone fears. That ethnically mixed schools largely populated by working-class kids in inner-city areas have slipped entirely out of control of teachers, parents, the adult world. That they really have become blackboard jungles where the violent rule and the weak are bullied beyond the point where they can cope. That education has become entirely irrelevant here because how to survive is the only study that matters. And that, like prisons, schools spit out monsters because, to live through them, a monster is what you have to become.

  The key figure here – apart from first-time director Huda – is Noel Clarke. The young black actor and screenwriter, best known before Kidulthood as the cutely inept Mickey in the revived Dr Who sci-fi TV series, was a shock as soon as he swaggered onscreen here. Clarke’s Sam is the nightmare hoodie, handsome face a mask of sheer fury, each word a weapon of guttural motor-mouth abuse, essaying a character which matches anything by De Niro, Pesci or Gandolfini for believable unfathomable violence. There is a movie bad guy that really sticks with you, that makes you move back away from the screen and feel genuinely threatened, and it’s the one that mixes an authentic portrayal of people you’ve met with a face and demeanour that suggests that this being has no fear whatsoever of death. He’s entirely psychologically prepared to be Pacino at the end of Scarface, getting riddled with bullets and still shooting back and screaming, ‘Fuck You!’ Or, at least, he is until he actually has to look death right in the eye, because a large part of his persona is based entirely on what he’s seen in movies like Scarface. But until that reality finally hits, he’ll never back down. He’ll never be scared into stopping. He can’t be reasoned with because there is no reason for his actions. He has no moral compass. He lives for the thrill of the power created by fear.

  Clarke captures this guy brilliantly in a few short scenes . . . and, crucially, he is not some distant monster from the Mafia or a part of America that most of us have no reason to enter. He’s a kid who lives round the corner from you in London, a city which is unique for putting people from extreme ends of the social, economic and cultural scale slap-bang next to each other. You remember that movie Notting Hill? Its sunny, wealthy, escapist vision of this uniquely confused area of West London is accurate too. Walk down one street in London W10 or W11 and it’s Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts sipping skinny lattes with the Prime Minister and discussing how many seats they want for Centre Court at Wimbledon and whether they fancy Ascot and Henley this year. Walk down the next and Sam is demanding your wallet and mobile at knife-point. Or, in the context of Kidulthood, two under-age girls walk right out of their sink estate and right into the posh bachelor flat of an actor who gives them money in return for sex and drugs. He doesn’t exactly look or sound like Hugh Grant, but . . .

  As we get our opening whistle-stop guided tour through the playground (and, boy, how inappropriate does anything as childlike as playing seem here) of this new kind of high school hell, Huda gives us everything we need to know in short scenes that scramble conventional narrative. The good-looking black boy doing something with a drill and then hiding a package in a skip; the two pleasant-looking white boys inviting everyone to a party while their parents are away; the bullied white girl and her friend being targeted by Sam, and the Catch 22 of trying to escape without a beating when looking at him is provocation and not looking at him is disrespect, and how easily he goads a chubby white girl into doing his dirty work for him; the pretty black and white girl chatting about clothes and boys and the mysterious drilling boy in particular; the sudden appearance of one teacher calling the mob into class, and your knowledge – you can almost hear the laughter of recognition among the film’s prime target audience – that this overweight, middle-aged white man with the put-upon look and the awful cardigan and the weak voice is no match for any of these kids. He dares to hurry one black boy along, gets a mean, silent glare, and shrinks and looks away in fear.

  So there is no help for Katie (Rebecca Martin). No adults at all anywhere near the classroom where Shaneek (Stephanie Di Rubbo), who has white skin but is all head and hand movements stolen from gangsta rap videos, and her black friend beat the pasty middle-class girl down for absolutely no reason. This is undercut with Sam’s gang facing down the group in which our drilling boy (Ameen as Trevor aka Trife) dwells, stealing a Gameboy, punching Trife in the gut, loving the power. No adults here either.

  Back to Shaneek and the rank, gynaecological verbal abuse she and her mate hand out to Katie. Huda has them showing out straight to camera, right into our faces, knowing that, for male viewers, the only thing worse than having your arse kicked by a Sam is having your arse kicked by these girls. Shaneek is definitely harder than me. I won’t lie. I know that because of . . . the punch. One of the best punches ever thrown in a movie.

  Huda is making you think that the worst thing that can happen in the scene is the humiliation. The abuse about Katie’s sexual experience (she’s both ‘virgin’ and ‘slag’, reinforcing this world where, once picked upon, you can’t win), the slaps, the powerlessness. Teachers are absent and none of the kids has the courage to come to her aid. And then . . . it just comes so suddenly. Part of the shock and power lies in the sound effect: it’s neither the standard cinematic ‘Thwack!’ nor a realistic dull thud. It’s a kind of crack meets crunch and it really fucking hurts. Shaneek is standing out of shot whil
e Katie is against a wall, and you can see a slight jump-cut. An arm delivers a straight right and whoever has thrown it has maybe done a bit of boxing. The film is slightly speeded up. The punch looks entirely like it makes full contact on bridge of nose and forehead, and Katie’s head snaps back, her reactions brilliantly real. She throws her hands up to her face, lets out a quiet ‘uh’ . . . and her body seems to give in, exactly as it does when you’ve been hit hard, and weren’t expecting it, and know instantly that you are not capable of fighting back. She slides down the wall into a foetal position, a broken doll. Fuck.

  All this has to be as utterly convincing as it is. Because Kidulthood’s day-in-the-life plot is shamelessly contrived and could just look like shoved-together bits of newspaper headlines and shock confessions from daytime TV. It doesn’t because this opening six minutes drags you kicking and screaming into a world where you don’t want to be but can’t help staring at with appalled voyeurism. It’s a stunning piece of film-making and one wonders if Huda and Clarke will ever match it.

  Because within minutes of the start of the film, Katie has hanged herself from her bedroom ceiling and the teens we’re being asked to pal around with for the next 85 minutes don’t care – except that they’ve been given the day off from school. It’s a bit much, storyline-wise. But you’re on the rollercoaster now and the nasty-looking dude who took your money ain’t letting you off. Tough. Live with it and don’t look down.