| this week's Tribune review : S E Halewood's 'BIGGA THAN BEN' [6/10] |
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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bigga Than Ben UK 2008 Starring : Ben Barnes, Andrei Chadov Director : S E Halewood ------------------------------------------------------------------------- IN 2001, Sergei Sakin and Pavel Tetersky made an unlikely splash in the Moscow publishing-scene with their debut Bolshe Bena - 'Bigger than Ben.' A runaway youth-market bestseller, and also named the year's best literary debut - it's the slangy diary of the pair's hectic 1999 sojourn in a pre-Crunch London apparently teeming with opportunity. The self-confessed "scumbags" eked out a living by whatever means necessary: petty theft, minor scams, breezy frauds. The Moscow Times wrote at the time that their cross between A Clockwork Orange, Trainspotting and Down and Out in Paris and London "brilliantly captures the cliche of the contemporary young Russian male: hard-edged, dishonest and callous, distilling his creative flair into nefarious, if not criminal activity... Sakin's example is not exactly luminous. Now he's waiting for Hollywood to call." In fact it wasn't Hollywood but Halewood - S E ('Suzie') - who came calling. Bigga Than Ben is, given the subject-matter, an suitably scrappy, low-budget debut from the writer-director. Staging a smash-and-grab raid on four UK screens (including Apollo West End and Tricycle Kilburn) before a rapid getaway to DVD and digitally-shot around many of the capital's seamier backwaters, Eastern Promises it most certainly ain't. We follow Spiker (Chadov) and Cobakka (Barnes) as they "study capitalism" in "foggy Albion," commenting on their own adventures and misadventures via copious voice-over - this technique just one among countless post-modern tricks deployed to spice up visuals and audio in a movie which firmly embraces the MTV-aesthetic so beloved of youth from Victoria to Vladivostok. Cast long before his career-making turn as Prince Caspian, Barnes is unrecognisable from the clean-cut hero of Narnia: scraggle-bearded, chain-smoking, the 27-year-old is sufficiently Slavic-looking (he resembles a dissolute version of Goran Ivanisevic) to pass muster alongside real-deal Chadov. While bolstering his pin-up status, Barnes also serves notice that there's also talent beneath the smouldering exteriors. His dour charisma helps ensure the protagonists prove intriguing company over the brisk running-time (end-credits start rolling - conspicuously slowly - at the 75-minute mark), and it's commendable that at no stage is their all-too-believable racism soft-pedalled - though of course exposure to London's melting-pot soon erodes such unappetising tendencies. Initially larky and jaunty, proceedings do lose their brio somewhat in the latter stages as events take a more serious turn - but the slick DV cinematography by Ben Moulden (remarkably, this is his first feature) remains a constant plus. Neil Young 30th September, 2008 written for the current issue of Tribune magazine  BIGGA THAN BEN : [6/10] : full title Bigga Than Ben - A Guide to Ripping Off London aka Bigga Than Ben - A Russians' Guide to Ripping Off London aka Bigga Than Ben : UK 2008 (copyright-dated 2007) : S. A. HALEWOOD : 82m seen 25th June 2008, Filmhouse Edinburgh (press show - Edinburgh International Film Festival) : original review (for The Hollywood Reporter)  |
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