Young Adam (2003)

Few movies are as vividly tactile as Young Adam. The way the cold blue light of Scotland envelopes everything--wooden bannisters, rippling water, rough fabric, coal soot caked in human skin, and flesh itself--makes you feel like you could reach out and touch it all. A failed writer named Joe (Ewan McGregor, Big Fish), slumming on a coal barge, finds himself drawn to barge's owner Ella (Tilda Swinton, Orlando, The Deep End), despite the presence of her husband Les (Peter Mullan, My Name is Joe). But Joe's passion is haunted by the girl he's abandoned (Emily Mortimer, Lovely & Amazing), whose memory becomes more and more powerful as a murder trial unfolds. The acting in Young Adam is magnificent, without affectation yet completely affecting. It's a moody film, but its deep engagement with its characters and the world they inhabit will make a lasting impression. --Bret Fetzer Amazon.com

Meandering down a canal with no aim

Four of my favorite actors in one rotten and pointless film.The characters are not formed at all.They are shells.If that is appealing to you watch it.Loads of sex that seems to have no reason except selfishness and boredom.The soundtrack,if that is what it can be called,continually forms around five chords which ultimately lead to the final credits song that has more words than the entire film.A major waste of time.There is not tone thing positive I can say about this film.Even with it's R rating with deleted scenes, this film starts in the same place it begins-NOWHERE. February 5, 2008

Yummers

One of the hottest movies ever of Ewan McGregor. It's one of those slow English things but you get to see 'all' of Ewan, so well worth the slow times. Gotta love the tag, tartan noir!! October 4, 2007

Sexual, erotic thriller--great combo of McGregor and Swinton..

Scotland, 1950s. Joe (McGregor) lives on a barge and engages in cold sexual encounters that only add to his sense of existential alienation. Then the body of a woman is found in the canal... The graphic content and frigid, sterile atmosphere pay homage to Trocchi's novel, and the excellent cast do justice to a minimalist script.
September 23, 2007

L'ATALANTE, SCOTTISH STYLE

Based on Alexander Trocchi's Young Adam, this movie was written and directed by Scottish director David Mackenzie in 2003. Since then, David Mackenzie also directed Asylum, the fascinating tale of a woman falling in love with a mad man.

Ewan McGregor is a drifter who uses to seduce every woman in sight. When his last girl-friend Emily Mortimer accidentally drowns in front of him, Ewan accepts to work on Peter Mullan's boat. Emily's corpse is found and an innocent married man is charged with the young girl's murder. Ewan seduces Tilda Swinton, his employers's wife, then even Tilda Swinton's sister while the accused is put on trial and sentenced to death.

YOUNG ADAM is a "cold" movie with its characters who are making love a lot but who don't love each other. The corpse of Emily Mortimer, after two days in water, is more vibrant in its frailty than the cold bodies of Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton, mechanically making love under the Scottish rain. YOUNG ADAM is a film a philosopher like Albert Camus could have written. It's a smart but desperate movie.

A DVD zone Ingmar Bergman is alive and well and living in Scotland.





July 7, 2007

More Black Scottish Humor

Ewan McGregor stars as "Joe Taylor"in "Young Adam," about a young Scottish drifter with literary pretensions working a coal barge that travels Glasgow to Edinburgh. The movie opens on his finding, and fishing out, the semi-nude corpse of a pretty girl from the black and frightening Clyde River (at the bottom of which we see the typewriter he dumped a while before). Taylor claims to know nothing about this corpse, but by the time the movie, directed by David Mackenzie, and its numerous flashbacks are done, we'll know that he actually knew her quite well: in fact, she was pregnant by him.

You wouldn't expect life on a coal barge to be clean, nor is it, and the makeup artists have done quite a job with the ordinarily handsome McEwan. He's pasty, as befits a resident Scot, drinking and smoking heavily, eating that unhealthy Scots diet, never seeing the sun. And there's ground-in coal dust on his face and in his clothes. The striking Tilda Swinton costars as Ella Gault, married to Les: they operate the barge together though we later discover she owns it. Poor Tilda, dead pale, hair lank and filthy, limited, dirty wardrobe: monosyllabic dialogue: in a career of choosing unexpected parts, this might be the least glamorous role she's ever played.

Anyway, for a married father,and a major male movie star, McGregor is also known for his daring choice of parts, indie and mainstream. He's played gay, and gay love scenes, and doesn't shrink from full frontal nudity. We've got some of that in "Young Adam,"as well, in the frequent, rather graphic sex scenes. His character Joe Taylor seems to fancy every woman he sees, and they all seem to fancy him right back. Mc Gregor is Scots, born in Crieff, educated at Kirkcaddy College, first came to notice in Danny Boyle's 1994 black comedy "Shallow Grave," and to stardom in Boyle's even blacker 1996 comedy "Trainspotting." Mc Gregor has starred in "Guys and Dolls" on the London stage, made "Moulin Rouge" and "Down With Love" in Hollywood, and "Little Voice" in England.

Swinton, best known for "The White Witch" in "The Chronicles of Narnia,"singes the screen with McGregor in their sex scenes, and for a woman with hardly any dialogue, she manages to express quite a lot. She was born in London of an Australian mother and a Scottish father, who was a Major General in the Scots Guard. It's said that the Swintons are the oldest family in Scotland and England: the male line has proven descent back to Saxon times. She currently lives in Nairn, Scotland.

The movie doesn't ever get off its Glasgow to Edinburgh axis, and not a whole lot happens. To be sure, Taylor gets quite a bit of female attention, and proves to be not a particularly likeable man. Ella demonstrates that she knows her way around a boat. There are some fairly taut courtroom scenes. But if you're a movie-movie person, the mise en scene is great, and the acting is at the highest level. October 6, 2006

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