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PURELY
BELTER
1/10
UK
2000
director - Mark Herman
script - Mark Herman, adapted from the novel by Jonathan Tulloch
cinematographer - Andy Collins
stars - Chris Beattie, Greg McClane, Charlie Hardwick
99 minutes
Purely Belter is the 54th film I have reviewed for Jigsaw Lounge,
and it is by some measure the worst. It's tougher to classify really bad
movies than really good, but I'd have no hesitation in placing Purely
Belter in the same atrocious division as Dobermann - which
was French, so God knows - and The Avengers - which was apparently
hacked about by the studio. There are no such excuses for Mark Herman,
and nowhere to hide. If it was up to me, Herman would never be allowed
within sight of a film set for the rest of his life, such is the cinematic
crime Purely Belter represents. From start to finish, it is crass,
trite, patronising, predictable, tedious, obvious and dull. Purely offensive,
in fact.
It's pointless to debate exactly where Purely Belter fits among
the all-time worst movies, but I have no hesitation in proclaiming one
small segment as the worst scene I have ever had the misfortune to witness
in a cinema. Whitley Bay, a grim wintry afternoon : Gerry (Beattie) has
been loafing around with his best mate, Sewell (McLane). Adolescent Gerry
has had a tough life. His dad (Tim Healy) is a violent alcoholic who bailed
out long ago, leaving his frail, bronchial wife (Hardwick) on her own
and returning for sporadic visits to abuse his family and steal what meagre
cash they've managed to scrape together. Gerry's sister Bridget (Kerry
Ann Christiansen) has long since fled the family home.
From the press notes: 'There's another surprise at Whitley Bay. As he's
wandering through the empty fairground, Gerry sees Bridget huddled on
one of the rides under a big coat. He tentatively approaches her. She
has the haunted look of the homeless and lurches from tender curiosity
about the family she's left behind to aggressive demands for money or
drugs. Gerry is heart-broken to see his sister so ravaged and begs her
to come home. She refuses, reminding him of what their Dad did to her
that made her leave.'
Words can't do justice to the staggering awfulness of this scene. Samples
of dialogue : "Where y'as going?" "Nowhere."... "What you on?" "Life,
man, just life." Herman ticks off the last box in his checklist of squalor,
adding incest to the rota of social ills the film so glibly gives lip-service
to : poverty, violence, drugs, abortion, crime. It's all here, a tapestry
of grim Geordie picturesque. Whitley Bay sums up and showcases Herman's
limitations: bewilderingly dreadful dialogue, ham-fisted characterisation,
bog-standard directorial input. It's deeply depressing, but not in the
way Mark Herman probably intended.
The plot, such as it is, follows Gerry and Sewell in their attempts to
accumulate sufficient cash to buy a season ticket for their beloved Newcastle
United. This quest of theirs starts off fairly idiotic - recovering a
broken toilet from the muddy sludge of the Tyne - but soon spirals off
into the realms of the ludicrous, culminating in a botched bank robbery
(botched as much by the script and direction as by the characters themselves),
then capped by a silly coda which shows the friends kind-of-but-not-quite
achieving their goals. Along the way there are all manner of absurdities
- I especially hated the subplot which has social worker Val McLane promising
Gerry a match ticket if he'll attend school for a fortnight. The punchline
is that the ticket turns out to be for Newcastle's hated rivals Sunderland
- as if Gerry, who's supposed to be so streetwise and clever, wouldn't
have established this beforehand. As if the two Geordies would even go
to Sunderland, let alone enter the Stadium of Light and sit clapping alongside
their bitter enemies.
This would perhaps be forgivable if the film went for a surrealistic or
off-the-wall tone. But no - Herman seems to think he's crafting a slice
of pure social realism, wallowing as he does in all the glue-sniffing,
car-nicking, house-breaking "truth" of these kids' lives. There's no way
to tell whether Beattie and McLane can act or not - they are given such
idiotic dialogue to spout, there's no way to tell. But if there's one
person you come away from Purely Belter with a higher regard for,
it's Andrew Shim, whose performance as a similarly deprived and abused
working-class kid in A Room For Romeo Brass is just light years
ahead of anything on screen here.
Saying that, perhaps I wouldn't have such regard for Shim if his character
had been required to take a baby to a nightclub, as transpires here. As
if a baby would ever be allowed into a nightclub. As if a baby, even in
the most Magpie-crazy pocket of the north-east, would ever be actually
christened "Sheara". And then, after their nightclub trip, the two lads
go to a fast-food takeaway and ask for a 'Gazza Special'. This is Geordie
life as phantasmagoric cartoon, a pantomime version of real social problems,
a cinematic travesty from start to finish. You end up having to cherish
the sheer awfulness of Herman's script - I hope the line about the Angel
of the North as "the patron saint of toe-rags" was his own invention,
rather than being taken from the novel. It's nice to see the Angel on
the big screen - but not so nice to see the supposedly intelligent and
streetwise Gerry labouring under the impression that said Angel is female.
But it seems unfair to pick out specific examples. Just about everything
in this film is poisonous: ill-thought-out, condescending, badly handled,
packed with sledgehammer ironies. Apparently it clocks in at less than
100 minutes, but I'm not convinced. It seemed interminable, inexhaustible
in its remorseless inanity. The title is off-target as the rest of the
film - despite what Herman may want to believe, nobody in the north-east
ever uses the phrase 'Purely Belter' to express approval. In this case,
'Strictly Bullshit' would be much closer to the mark.
October 23rd,
2001
(seen
22-Oct-01, UGC Boldon)
For
the many other films as bad as this (and worse) check out our Diorama
of Dishonour
by Neil
Young
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