Barnard’s laser precise vision of working class social realism is a joy to watch before it dissolves into genre clichés.
How does a filmmaker stand out when approaching the British “kitchen sink” drama? A genre that has persisted since the 1950s and subsequently and perpetually been mined for its precious diamond in the rough resources. Adapting Kieron Goddard’s novel of the same name, director Clio Barnard, a regular of the genre, makes an exciting and authentic version of parallel lives in working class Birmingham with I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning. Her detail and direction are spot on but the themes and morals of the melodramatic observations are too familiar to leave the heavy impression it should.
Following five friends who all grew up on the same housing estate in Birmingham Barnard and writer Enda Walsh offer a fully rounded portrait of each ricocheting personality. Opening on a woozy birthday scene in a local pub the friends drink, laugh and club in an energetic and realistic vision of British night out culture. It’s the type of hopped up night reminiscent of untethered youth, though these people are thirty and they’re not getting any younger. There’s a constant, intense feeling of dancing next to the edge of a cliff that hues the film with an uncomfortable tension. One wrong move and everything could all fall apart.
Birthday boy Oli (Jay Lycurgo) still lives in Birmingham after substance abuse problems, though remains admirably upbeat and likeable through Lycurgo’s infectious charm. Rian (Joe Cole) has made a lot of money and lives in a swanky penthouse suite in Canary Wharf though in typical style the money hasn’t seemed to bring him much happiness. Patrick (Anthony Boyle) and Shiv (Lola Petticrew) have two young daughters and have been together since they were fifteen. Patrick works as a food delivery cyclist, the kind where you’re exploited day and night for a wage below minimum and Shiv stays at home with the kids. Each person has their own struggles but they thrive in their very real and nourishing friendships to each other that keep their heads above water. Only Conor (Daryl McCormack), a recent new dad, has let his drinking problem get way out of control. He’s attempting to rebuild the fallen estates of their youth for the next generation of families after him but is barely keeping the project under control and falling into a dangerous pattern that could destroy them all.
On the outside through Barnard’s gritty and sensitive portrayal of the forking directions we all take as humans the film looks and feels like a project imbued with great love and care. The actors all give fantastic performances, especially McCormack, Lycurgo and Petticrew who each offer powerful alternatives to the friends with incredible clarity. Conor is what can happen when ambition and restorative retribution for the past overwhelms and pushes someone to breaking point. His building plan is a marker of the unfair changes the modern world has foisted onto people like him and left them behind. Oli is a result of this hardship and how it can break a spirit but also leave behind a certain admirable resilience and Shiv has struck a balance between her quiet reality and acceptance that what she’s got maybe isn’t so bad. But it’s hard to see when the city is crumbling around you and it’s hard to see when there are so many personal problems and so little resources.
As we observe each person navigate their reality the film disappointingly offers up some showy and overly dramatic moments of tension and warbling soliloquies around affordable housing and being left behind that spells out the message a little too neatly. There is not much room for subtlety in the dialogue which is better rendered through visual means. Rian’s plight as the guilt riddled success story that muddies his achievements is the predictable angle for his character and there are too many of these parallels that don’t offer a different spin on this type of drama. The film works best when it lets its characters breathe and interact with each other with a more relaxed edge but as is with life it can be impossible to do just that.
3 / 5
I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is an enjoyable stab at neorealism that can’t quite escape the prison of familiar genre elements it traps itself in.
