by Harry Varvaressos
Worth: $16.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Sydney Film Festival
Cast:
Anthony Boyle, Joe Cole, Millie Brady, Lola Petticrew, Jay Lycurgo, Daryl McCormack
Intro:
Like a warm hug from an overly familiar uncle, I See Buildings is not always elegant, but its heart is firmly – joyously – right where it ought to be.
We all need a big hug once in a while – whether in the form of a human being or motion picture.
The formidable Clio Barnard (Ali & Ava, The Selfish Giant) returns with one of her own, an unabashedly sincere and powerful adaptation of Keiran Goddard’s novel of the same name.
In the quintessentially British tradition of ‘kitchen-sink’ cinema, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning follows a quintet of longtime friends – now in their early thirties – who find themselves stranded at a variety of personal (and sometimes intersecting) crossroads.
Born and raised in Birmingham’s working class, the group have struggled to improve their socio-economic standing – with one exception: the self-effacing Rian (Joe Cole), who feels undeserving of his financial success and his upper-crust new girlfriend (Millie Brady). His closest friend, the shrewd and loyal Patrick (Anthony Boyle), delivers food via push-bike to support his high school sweetheart Shiv (Lola Petticrew) and their two kids. Rounding out the five is burly new dad Conor (Daryl McCormack), whose housing development project is being bankrolled by Rian, and the winning Oli (Jay Lycurgo), an occasional drug dealer who always keeps a cheeky quip in his back pocket.
Taking cues from Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, Barnard is intent on disentangling audiences from archetypal portrayals of Britain’s working class. Despite their thick Black Country brogues and remarkable aptitude for rocking a parka, these individuals are savvy, politically aware and genuinely wise. They are no strangers to hardship, yet Barnard’s portrayal cannily reflects their economic strife as a burdensome fact of life rather than a fundamental definition of character.
Instead, it is their navigation of the vicissitudes of long-term friendship that forms her focus, as life mercilessly ambushes them with interpersonal stressors. What resonates above all else is not their resilience against socio-economic disadvantage but their emotional sophistication and sensitivity towards each other – by any metric.
Most resonant of all is Barnard’s heartfelt depiction of male friendship. Of particular relevance in our ‘epidemic of male loneliness’, where close relationships between adult men are increasingly scarce and the duty of fulfilling their emotional needs falls unduly upon significant others, Rian, Patrick, Conor and Oli set a shining example. It’s been over a decade since they’ve been schoolmates; they have demanding jobs, long-term partners and families to support, and in some cases live in different cities, but it doesn’t matter one bit: they’re there for each other.
In one especially moving sequence, Patrick receives an anguished call from the heartbroken and very drunk Rian. ‘I’m on my way,’ he responds, without hesitation, travelling to London in the lonesome dark of the morning to hold him as he weeps. The sight of Cole – an ex-Peaky Blinder no less – evincing such shattering vulnerability leaves us hard-pressed not to follow in kind.
And that’s not to discount Shiv, who is depicted as a full-fledged member of their crew, resisting not only the assumption that friendship groups are exclusively sexed, but that long-term partners belong in a social domain firmly sealed off from the lads.
The fresh-faced cast, who will be more familiar to fans of British television, are uniformly excellent, with Boyle’s laddish sagacity registering most memorably. A particular credit to the ensemble: for what is ostensibly a drama, I See Buildings is extraordinarily funny. Supporting the thesis that an average night out with your mates is more riotous than any manufactured comic scenario, the laughter they share is as crucial to elucidating the depth of their connections as their pain. For Aussies, the endlessly inventive jabs and jibes travel particularly well.
It’s not the tightest piece of work – the social critiques can feel thuddingly didactic (i.e. Boyle monologuing to the audience about economic inequality), occasionally jarring time jumps will be unsurprising to anyone who’s viewed their share of novel adaptations, and the hackneyed plotline documenting Conor’s alcoholic decline gets too much airtime – but perhaps that’s appropriate. Like a warm hug from an overly familiar uncle, I See Buildings is not always elegant, but its heart is firmly – joyously – right where it ought to be.
