Human Traffic

A film about one weekend in Cardiff. There are five friends. All young, all working jobs they dislike, all waiting for Friday. Jip works behind a counter in a shop. He has a sexual problem and can tell nobody. Lulu is at university. Her decisions about men always turn out badly. Koop works in a record shop. Nina is at a call centre and hates her manager. Moff is unemployed; his father is a policeman and he does not want his mother to know. From there the film spreads across a weekend. Friday evening's preparation, the club, the night, going home in the morning, and Sunday's collapse. Drugs are inside the narrative. The film neither celebrates nor warns; it shows them as they are, as something ordinary. What the narrative is interested in is not the party but emptiness: all five have unbearable weekday lives, and the weekend is not the answer to that but only a postponement. The form is loose and deliberately so. The characters speak to camera, fantasy scenes cut in, the screen freezes, and text is laid over the image. One scene takes place at a family dinner. The section at Moff's house is the film's best written moment. The music is its spine. British club music from the end of the 1990s plays throughout and the scenes are built to the tracks. The Sunday section changes the tone. The narrative moves out of enjoyment into a kind of shame, and the film becomes unexpectedly serious there. John Simm, Shaun Parkes, Nicola Reynolds, Danny Dyer and Lorraine Pilkington are in the cast. Justin Kerrigan wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes 1990s club culture and free-form films about the young. Who it is not for: anyone looking for plot; there is almost no story and some of the devices have aged.