The Young Blackbird

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22 September

Two films shown to-night deserve treating together, although not quite in the same category : one was a feature film, Blackbird (2013), the other what was described to us (using another reviewer's words) as 'cinematic non-fiction', Only the Young (2012).

The latter made good what the former tried to do, because it had a grasp that was too insubstantial of what it was about, other than portraying a small West-Coast community (in Dumfries and Galloway, I am told) and the notion of trying to preserve what made it was both by capturing things before they fell prey to loss of memory or death, and not allowing it to be taken over by impulses that might change it for the worse. Anyone who knows and loves Scotland would have been in such places, would have recognized the people, and felt that emotional pull - anyone who does not might feel out on a limb to understand it or the social and cultural influences.

Already, then, a sort of preaching that might only work to the converted (but maybe not). In any case, we are invited to look, in part, at this place through the eyes of Ruadhan (pronounced 'Rowan'), played by Andrew Rothney, and his brother Callum.

This is where the brilliantly made Only the Young comes in : where the two friends live with whom we spend much of our time (Garrison and Kevin), there is an abandoned mini-golf course, where the restaurant served steak but which must have proved not to be the right attraction to be supported by that place, and pools and even a water-flume in a back garden that have also, if not outlived their usefulness, then not been kept up. Even at this level, the comparison is clear : Ruadhan decks out and lives in a beached vessel, whereas the boys and their friends have taken over an abandoned property as a base.

His motives are different, and his relations other, because (whether he is a relative or just an older person with songs to pass on) Alec sums up his screwed-up narcissism just right, and my experience in mental health would see him not as someone whose desire to collect oral traditions (there is nothing to suggest that he does anything with them) and make his own world is helpful even for him. Kevin, Garrison, Skye and Kristen maybe have a worldview from their Grace Baptist background to contend with (although they seemed accepting of the idea that the elders would influence their choice of loved ones, and so 'shepherd' their lives), but they are living, developing, dealing with life's problems.

Blackbird has only rather falsely, at the end, a notion of moving on, of dealing with life. I say 'falsely' for two reasons : one that I do not believe that Ruadhan can simply progress, and without intervention, in the way that we are invited to believe, when what I see suggests that what is actually going to hold him back is a not being able to let go (where Alec is spot on) that is a well-established psychological disorder, and second that, even if that were not so, the riskily transformative moment that his brother brings about is the film's emotional high point, and everything just drains away from it.

If Ruadhan were the sort to give of what is precious to him to cock a snook at the forces of change (for me, that does not quite ring true), it just becomes a barb to prick him, just as the wishes for a job when he cashes a giro on the heels of Alec's pension), when his insulting gesture is looked at as a possible bonus. With, back at the other film, Garrison and Co., we have no such sense of easy answers, and that the answer to one's head is to remove the brick wall that one is banging it against, or, rather, it from striking distance from the wall.

So, Blackbird seems to understand, and even to make accessible, someone with a very confused personality (principally via Amy as the love-interest), but then leads us on with the idea that it is purely situational. From that perspective, I wish that it had not even bothered to try to share notions of what such a person might be like, and have far more warmth for the achievements of Only the Young, not unlike those of Bombay Beach.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)