Film reviews: Best Before Death | Scheme Birds, Edinburgh International Film Festival
Best Before Death **** | Scheme Birds *** Edinburgh International Film Festival
It’s hard to know what to make of Swedish documentary makers Ellen Fisk and Elinor Hallin’s intent in making the Motherwell-set Scheme Birds. They provide a view of contemporary Scotland so brutal it’s almost too difficult to watch and yet they also seem to be on the side of their main subject, Gemma, a Motherwell teen who seems happy about embracing the “knocked up or locked up” destiny that’s been drummed into the kids who live on her estate. Shooting her surroundings with a visual poetry that may occasionally slip into ruin porn cliché yet also goes some way to helping us see why she has no desire to leave (at least not initially), the film challenges us to put aside our own prejudices and be just as empathetic towards the no-nonsense Gemma and her friends. That’s a big ask, especially when these kids (and they are kids) start having kids of their own and the filmmakers depict them sentimentalising motherhood while chain-smoking through pregnancy and defending their Buckfast-and-drug-guzzling boyfriends. A horrific act of violence perpetrated against one of their friends (by one of their friends) is the only thing that seems to get through to them and we see Gemma starting to make changes in her life to give herself and her baby son on a better chance. But for how long? A cutesy final image of her cooing over her toddler as she films him learning to box disconcertingly brings to mind the ending of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
ALISTAIR HARKNESS