Swedish idyll

Everlasting Moments
15, Key Cities

Awaydays
18, Nationwide

The film is meticulously illuminated, and meticulously composed, which may be only fitting, considering photography has such a central role, and it’s as epic as it is intimate, with events playing out against various backdrops that include the socialist revolution, The Great War, Swedish emigration to America and the advent of new technologies like cinema and domestic electricity but not flat-packed furniture, which did not arrive to torment us until the 1950s. (Years after I assembled an Ikea bathroom cabinet upside down, we are still opening it from the top.)

As far as elegiac, period movies go, Everlasting Moments does not re-invent the wheel — I’m thinking Pelle the Conqueror, for example — but it doesn’t matter. And the wheel doesn’t need re-inventing anyway. It does what it is meant to do sublimely well. (Leave the wheel alone!) Troell, by the way, is now 77 and as he says in the press notes: ‘At my age, a person must choose very carefully how to spend the last vestiges of his time and energy as an active filmmaker. His hand must be turned to something quite extraordinary.’ This, I’m guessing, is why he didn’t opt for X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

And, now, on to Awaydays, which I saw because it’s a British film and one wants to support British films and blah-de-blah but, honestly. In the accompanying bumf it describes itself as ‘Quadrophenia meets Control’ and ‘Trainspotting meets Stand By Me’, but neither would stand up in court. Plus, I think we’ll decide what meets what around here.

It is based on the book by Kevin Sampson, is set in Liverpool in the late Seventies, belts out a post-punk soundtrack (Echo and the Bunnymen, Joy Division, Ultravox), and focuses on a lad called Carty (Nicky Bell), an art school drop-out who yearns to join ‘The Pack’, a gang of football hooligans whose favoured activity involves slicing faces off their enemies with Stanley knives. Nice. Still, Carty is looking for a way in and eventually he finds it via his friendship with Elvis (Liam Boyle), whom he meets at a gig and who is already a pack member. There may be a homo-erotic aspect to their relationship, but as it is so ill-defined it’s hard to tell. And who cares, anyway.

The performances are good, actually — particularly Bell’s — but the film lacks any context. Why is Carty so excited by violence? Why do The Pack accept Elvis, when he is so fey? Why are The Pack so angry? How many cheeks do I have to see sliced off? Where is the humanity of Shane Meadows when you most need it? And, ultimately, what’s it all about, pussycat? No idea.

So, Everlasting Moments it is then, unless you are that even bigger fool, in which case I will leave you with this: when assembling a flat-pack, do check you are holding the instructions the right way up...