Synopsis
A racist skinhead falls in love with a black woman.
A racist skinhead falls in love with a black woman.
Cuts to the bone.
Also, can we all just admit Ewen Bremner is one of the most underrated and under-utilised actors of our time?
am currently reading the works of Sarah Kane (just 4.48 Psychosis left), and they all come from a fathomless, impossibly dark void thats rotting in the core of the planet’s psyche
this isn’t from there
Startling short Channel 4 film directed by ID scribe Vincent O'Connell from playwright Sarah Kane whose light burned brightly but briefly; she committed suicide just four years later.
It tells the story of Billy, an angsty racist skinhead, who has seemingly (perhaps to temper his vile views) leapt from the pages of Viz, with his Union Jack undies and his perpetually bemused and guileless face from the ever-bold Ewen Bremner. Billy's a very confused soul indeed, he's beginning to get feelings for the young Black woman who lives acriss the road. Acting on an impulse, he goes over there to introduce himself and the girl, Marcia (Marcia Rose), takes him to her bed. What follows is a very violent love…
Sarah Kane's script is excellent, but the film tries to match Kane's violent, avant-garde narrative frenzy and everything gets a little bit too over the top. If directed by someone with more subtlety than muscle, it would have been a masterpiece.
Can we all agree to stop making movies about neo-Nazis called fucking SKIN?
sarah kane my beloved <3
tbh this rlly doesn’t do her justice but it can be a wonderfully grotesque introduction to her other works
sarah kane can do no wrong
weirdly enough, works better as a script than a short. so much about this just feels very incongruous with the tone and mood of the play on paper, or sarah kane’s whole oeuvre even. her writing is intimate, visceral, and poetic despite dealing with some of the darkest, most painful aspects of humanity, a world where sex is violence and suffering is redemption, and a lot of that is lost in the warm colours and jaunty score and manic editing. just a very jarring experience, idk!
I miss Sarah Kane's voice in art something fierce.
They should have set this in the early-80s; racist skinhead gangs in London covered in swastikas was rather passé by 1995, and not something I ever witnessed back then. Whenever some kind of Nazi skinhead thing was in the News at this time, it was a lonewolf weirdo like nailbomber David Copeland moaning that there WEREN'T loads of Nazi skinhead villains roaming the streets of South London.
The acting sucks, and the script is awful. Here's a key scene to show how bad the writing is (the scene was filmed up the road from where I live):
They sit on her bed holding hands.
Black female: "You never touched a black woman before?"
Racist Skinhead: " Only with a baseball…
Wishing to study one of Sarah Kane’s plays for my English coursework, and while discussing it with a friend more familiar with her work, I was reminded of the existence of this short film that she wrote which we proceeded to watch (even more uncomfortable and awkward to watch while sitting in a sixth form common room).
Despite being aware of the plot of the short, I still found myself surprised and startled by it- It was more extreme than I expected it to be and extremely uncomfortable. Kane’s writing is extremely powerful and ironic. Apparently it was originally written as a 30 minute screenplay, and while I feel it should’ve been longer, I’m not sure what the extra 20…
Uncomfortable to the core, genuinely hated every second of this but I think that was the whole point