Neds On general release from 21st January
“Ned” is Scottish parlance for a white adolescent working-class male with a penchant for hooliganism and sportswear logos. Some claim it stands for non-educated delinquent but that’s a retrospectively applied “backronym.” Yet education is at the core of Peter Mullan’s vivid film. Glaswegian John McGill (newcomer Conor McCarron) starts out in the 1970s as a swot and prodigy whose hoodlum elder brother helps him with bullies and whose drunken father (played by Mullan) ritually abuses his mother. Crushing bureaucratic negligence soon pushes John into gang life. He starts to fail at school and becomes deeply conflicted and dangerous.
This grim set-up should not, however, lead one to imagine that Neds is just another cheap holiday in someone else’s British social-realist misery. Mullan’s film not only has the sense of mythic grandeur that attends the most profound tragedies, it also surprises us by portraying McGill’s adolescent visions with a Fellini-esque sense of ecstatic glory. The film is violent at times and not always coherent, but it does add up to a powerfully evocative impressionist work, with a thrilling star-is-born performance from McCarron.
“Ned” is Scottish parlance for a white adolescent working-class male with a penchant for hooliganism and sportswear logos. Some claim it stands for non-educated delinquent but that’s a retrospectively applied “backronym.” Yet education is at the core of Peter Mullan’s vivid film. Glaswegian John McGill (newcomer Conor McCarron) starts out in the 1970s as a swot and prodigy whose hoodlum elder brother helps him with bullies and whose drunken father (played by Mullan) ritually abuses his mother. Crushing bureaucratic negligence soon pushes John into gang life. He starts to fail at school and becomes deeply conflicted and dangerous.
This grim set-up should not, however, lead one to imagine that Neds is just another cheap holiday in someone else’s British social-realist misery. Mullan’s film not only has the sense of mythic grandeur that attends the most profound tragedies, it also surprises us by portraying McGill’s adolescent visions with a Fellini-esque sense of ecstatic glory. The film is violent at times and not always coherent, but it does add up to a powerfully evocative impressionist work, with a thrilling star-is-born performance from McCarron.
