#SWEET SIXTEEN MOVIE REFERENCES DRIVER#

Yet for all this uncompromising reality, the picture is not entirely despairing. Poor Jean is more child than mother and Liam's granddad is literally toothless.Дrugs seem to be the only authority. There are no authority figures here: no teachers, no police other than the hapless, helmetless copper, and no real parents. And behind it all are the drugs: no one is shown taking them - not even the self-destructive Pinball - but the invincible economy of heroin drives everything. Her objections are futile.ДЇinally, Liam winds up by the sea, like Antoine in The 400 Blows, considering - what? His future? His past? His present seems pretty hazy, at all events. Once, only once, is anyone shown standing up to the dealers: a woman with a baby in a buggy, who sees through Liam's pizza-delivery front and demands that he go away. It's only when you realise that drugs themselves, and the associated violence, victimhood and hopelessness, are regarded as comically commonplace, that the laughter dies.

#SWEET SIXTEEN MOVIE REFERENCES DRIVER#

He rides pillion on a pizza scooter as a cover for his door-to-door 'deliveries', a time-consuming business the legitimate pizzas go cold, and the poor driver whinges at him to 'get a fuckin' move on'. But there's queasy black comedy too in the scam that Liam dreams up for selling drugs. It's when Liam and Pinball are up to minor crimes that their antics seem like a laugh: nicking a policeman's motorbike helmet, selling knock-off cigs. There's no using his 'heid' this time, and this knife is going to play a horrible part on his much-anticipated 16th birthday. But when Liam falls in with some grown-up gangsters and has to undergo a horrific initiation ceremony to please them - as suspenseful and chilling as any thriller - he receives a switchblade as a graduation present.

'No, I'm goin' to use this,' he says, tapping his forehead. When Pinball offers him a flick-knife to defend their new turf, he considers it and hands it back. Bitterly, she remembers when he fought big kids at the children's home: 'You didn't fight them because you were brave you fought them because you didn't care what happened to you. It is at moments like these that he has to be nursed by his sister Chantelle (Annmarie Fulton), a single mother with a council flat of her own. He even appears in front of his attackers in a stairwell, as if by magic - having been left face down on the gravel behind them just a moment before. But it's a dream he pursues with fanatical determination, getting regularly beaten senseless by his competitors: there's an extraordinary sequence where Liam is left unconscious by three drug-dealers, yet keeps rearing up like the Terminator. But the only way he can afford it is to steal Stan's heroin and sell it himself, undercutting the opposition, with the aid of his supremely dodgy mate Pinball (William Ruane), whose only talent is for stealing expensive cars.Д¬ompston's Liam is heart-rendingly naive in his assumption that once he has got enough drugs money, he can abandon the trade and live with his mother in a vaguely imagined bucolic bliss in this caravan. Liam has a big idea for a surprise for when she gets out, a date that almost coincides with his 16th birthday: he will buy his mum a caravan, with its own permanent pitch overlooking the Clyde. Non-Scots audiences will have to pay attention to catch what everyone's saying, though, and there are actually subtitles for the first 15 minutes - after which everyone is assumed to have got the hang of it.Д¬ompston plays Liam, who lives with his cantankerous grandfather and abusive drug-dealing stepfather Stan (Gary McCormack), waiting for his mother Jean (Michelle Coulter) to be released from prison. Loach, as it happens, has discovered his own authentic star: the non-professional teenager Martin Compston, who takes to the camera like a natural without ever appearing to be acting. It's very different from the comically hyperactive world of, say, Danny Boyle's Trainspotting, with its riffing voiceovers, set pieces and stars. Loach's social-realist drama, written by his longtime collaborator Paul Laverty, is a distinctive, piercingly serious vision. Yet there's sweetness of a sort, an elusive sort, to be found in his tremendously powerful, occasionally grimly humorous new movie, set in the wretched estates of Greenock, where boys and girls of all ages are to be found mortgaging their existences for tenner-bags of smack. And as adjectives go, the one in this title couldn't be more ironic.

Maybe not much has changed in this director's vision, except to get worse, because not much has changed in the unfashionable things he wants to make films about.

Sweet sixteen movie references