Twin Town as a Sequence of Revenge - Movie Review Example

Twin Town The film Twin Town by Kevin Allen is contemporary drama and has the vibrant spirit and energy of new wave cinema of Britain. Set against the background of Swansea, an industrial town in South Wales the film is fresh and sardonically funny. A morbid comedy, the film tells the story of a bitter feud between two rebel teenage brothers and the local businessman who betrayed their father. Julian and Jeremy are the two brothers who are thought to be twins by all those who know them in the town of Swansea. They were given the name twins to explain the obesity of their mother during her pregnancy. The brothers are a menace to society. They enjoy stealing cars, smoking marijuana and driving recklessly through the streets of Swansea terrorising the people. Julian and Jeremy have no other ambition in life but to steal cars to get money for drugs. The story of the film is about these two crude, drug-addicted brothers. Their father, Fatty, gets injured while working for a corrupt contractor, Bryn Cartwright. Jeremy and Julian want money as compensation for the injury but Cartwright refuses. Cartwright is actually a drug trafficker posing as a respectable businessman, in league with two corrupt policemen, Greyo and Terry. The brothers retaliate and go after Cartwright and his associates with a vengeance, brutally attacking their families and their pets. Cartwright too retaliates with the help of two corrupt policemen. As the conflicts continues, the feud gets out of control, leading to the beheading of the Cartwrights pet poodle. Terry Walsh then sets fire to the mobile home of the Lewis family causing the deaths of the twins family. The twins then murder Bryn and Terry in retaliation. Twin Town is a sequence of revenge acts between two groups of people linked to each other in all sorts of ways. The plot is a mixture of comedy and pathos interspersed with gory episodes. There is murderous revenge, destruction; there are violent beatings, drug deals, crooked cops side by side with karaoke sessions and massage parlours. The end is rather poetic with strains of the local choir showing a pleasant part of the town, Swansea. The subplots in the movie provide a realistic, honest and hilarious comedy. The whole story revolves round an amoral section of society where corruption is considered normal. Here even the vicar can be bought. The police are portrayed as criminals and the rest of the characters switch between crime and honest living with ease and with no qualms whatsoever. However in the end one feels that the central theme that runs throughout the film is a family bond, a bond that is important and at times unconventional. The characters are beautifully crafted. The twins are hilarious and are shown as exaggerated caricatures of disaffected youth. They are clumsy with permanent grins affixed to their faces. The brothers belong to a colourful, lower class family. Their father is a carpenter, and their mother is always shown scolding the boys for making fun of their sister. The sister works for a massage parlour but insists that she is working for a health spa. Actually she works in a brothel as a receptionist as well as a prostitute. This portrayal of the lower-class status of the family is an integral part of the plot of the movie. Other than the twins, there is this crude, larger-than-life, the Welsh nouveau-rich Bryn Cartwright who is the owner of the local rugby club. Then you have Dai Rhys, an aging builder who is fond of singing songs of Elvis from the rooftop. There is also this police duo of Terry and Greyo who form an excellent good and bad cop partnership. Terry is a cop who goes around punching kids in the belly and Greyo is a crooked but essentially a smart guy who struggles with his Welsh sense of fair play. Bryns daughter Bonny is an aspiring karaoke singer. Other than these characters there are a host of other characters, including a pair of family dogs. The director takes a hard look at Swansea life through his different characters. Most of them do not glorify Wales but actually put Wales to shame though humorously and at times with violence. Some of the characters may be ruthless, yet you tend to fall in love with them. The town Swansea, immortalised by Dylan Thomas, as an ugly, lovely town, is the heart of the film and to establish this the first opening senes of Twin Town have shots carefully chosen by the director. There are host of local people in the opening scenes, creating an ugly and surreal picture of the town. A carnival like atmosphere is created with scenes of children, a girl running with roller blades on her feet, a young boy, running with a rugby ball wearing a Welsh football shirt, an old man in a vest, two nurses, a man carrying a can of lager, and a man fixing his motorbike. The scenes emphasise the fact that all characters form a close-knit community and this is highlighted in the colourfulness of their greetings. There is an intense individuality in these images unlike the Welsh stereotypes in films of the past. Twin Town’s opening scenes reveal the drive to break with the past. There is an air of defiant, stirring celebrations in the atmosphere. Through the first scene that has a landscape shot of a block of terraced housing along with with a credit sequence the audience get a geographical knowledge of where the film is set. Then there is the sound of a woman singing and it is a known fact that Welsh people are famous for singing. Through these shots he creates a setting that the audience can relate to. The scene that shows a group of children playing rugby is again "Welsh" as rugby is very popular in Wales. The film is a loosely woven picture of reality. The environment created is that of the under-privileged and is urban and mundane. The drama, idiocy, beauty, violence, and humour that surround our everyday life are loosely woven to present a picture of reality. The screenplay is new and refreshing and does not use overused clichés that mar so many films made these days. The film uses a rich blend of Welsh dialect, language, phrases and swear words. The humour and irony is superb, particularly the razor sharp sarcasm of Adie. A mood of defiant celebration is created through humour in the film. Kevin Allen in this film is not sure whether to pay some kind of homage to Swansea or whether to make a serious social commentary or simply satisfy the desire of the viewers to enjoy dark comedy. The narrative is through episodes. The movie keeps moving madly between exaggerated realism and dark fantasy, and the director is unable to find the right balance. In parts the film is a lively, enjoyable amusing representation of a Wales we rarely get to see today. But some parts are distorted, cliché-ridden with slapstick murders and an impossible Moroccan ocean escape. The film works on your emotions to leave you shaken by the violence of the events. The opening of the film makes you expect a light-hearted charade. However the theme of revenge transforms from the frivolous into the serious with a speed that makes you gasp. The film at the end gathers in all the loose threads and concludes in a finale of grand proportion leaving you with a sense of deep justice. The film gives an insight of life in urban Swansea and presents both the rich but unsophisticated life of the elite as well as the bleak, sordid life of the masses. The drug abuse, the car theft, the indifferent and corrupt police are all aspects of modern Swansea that are shown in uncomfortable detail. Many residents of Swansea will vouch for the accuracy of the uncanny nightclub scenes. If ever a location symbolised what a film stood for, it is Swansea. Twin Town explores the disturbance caused by the rapid industrialization in south Wales and the search for a modern national and cultural identity. Kevin Allen portrays a number of interesting relationships through themes and issues such as music, rugby, and community. These themes and issues have historically been a part of Welsh films. However in this movie they have been distorted to some extent to create a sneering and mocking commentary on modern Wales. Cinema at times can be used for symbolic expression of cultural identity. Certain Welsh films have attempted to present the complex and the continuously changing concept identity of modern Wales. Modern Wales has been a witness to the contradictory forces of Globalisation and Devolution that has sometimes created cultural confusion. Movies like the traditional and stereotypical How Green Was My Valley and The Corn Is Green, the colorful and the vibrant Twin Town and Human Traffic and the tri-lingual Solomon a Gaenor have all depicted the changing face of Wales. Films by the new generation directors are satirical with modern themes and these directors have introduced new themes in their movies sometimes with shocking effect. They are passionate about conveying their version of Wales. It is this context one can say that the movie Twin Town represents the changing cultural identity of Wales. According to Michael Wilmington, Twin Town could be seen as a kind of cultural corrective, by a younger Welsh generation impatient with the past." (Michael Wilmington (1997), Chicago Tribune). The opening monologue to Twin Town: Rugby. Tom Jones. Male Voice Choirs. Shirley Bassey. Snowdonia. Prince of Wales. Anthony Hopkins. Daffodils. Sheep. Sheep Lovers. Coal. Slate Quarries. The Blaenau Ffestiniog Dinkey-Doo Miniature Railway. Now If Thats Your Idea Of Thousands Of Years Of Welsh Culture, You Cant Blame Us For Trying To Liven The Place Up A Little Can You? (Retrieved from http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0120394/) is an indication of the intentions of the movie. Many think that Britons are only" English". They need to be reminded that Britain is also home to the Scots and the Welsh. The cultural identity of both the ethnic groups were discovered by moviegoers in 1990s when they were introduced to a series of popular British films set in their respective lands. This process began in 1996 with Danny Boyles Trainspotting, a depressing but visually impressive tale of urban Scotland. Danny Boyle produced Kevin Allens Twin Town, a year later, an equally depressing tale of modern Wales. Allen here sets out to deliberately debunk the typical, traditional Welsh stereotype image that is positive and ingrained in the minds of the people, an image of closely knit families and villages, leading happy contented lives while singing hymns in Welsh, bearing little resemblance to reality and making contemporary Welsh squirm. There is however another stereotype less positive and less wholesome where the Welsh are seen as impractical talkers and singers with distaste for the Welsh language. Welsh people themselves often believe in this negative image. Twin Town portrays this negative stereotype and paints an unattractive picture of Welsh life replete with unemployment, drugs, casual sex and violence. One can see in Twin Town a desire to change peoples stereotypical and narrow-minded images of traditional Welsh culture by portraying diverse characters and adding a bit of local colour. The characters are not depicted as typically Welsh but as victims of their unfortunate surroundings. Dave Berry, Welsh film historian, and many others feel that Twin Town demeans Wales and its people and also that the film suggests that traditions like community loyalty, decency, camaraderie, a shared love of culture, music and rugby are all redundant in a greedy world. But the director claims that it is an "acid love-letter to my home town". He argues that the film can be set in any contemporary British city. Crime and drugs are there everywhere. The director here creates a new version of Wales. The film is about a period when people of modern Wales distanced themselves from rugby, coal mining and poetry to live in a modern Europe. The writers of the movie Kevin Allen and Paul Durden used their Swansea background to portray razor sharp pictures of life and times in Swansea in the 1990s. Twin Town is not all about that is traditional Welsh be it Welsh choirs or sheep farmers. In fact it makes a mockery of the quaint stereotypes. Wales more than any other place in Britain suffered from de-industrialization as it relied a great deal on its coal-mining industry. Wales of Twin Town is not the town of Dylan Thomass A Childs Christmas in Wales. It is a place of squalor and disenchantment. It is bankrupt and polluted and the characters that dwell in Swansea of Twin Town are not exactly simple and uncomplicated. Even the twins are not exactly Welsh. Kevin Allen says of the twins "I dont think theyre typical of just Welsh youth - I think theyre typical of youth all over the world, "Theres nothing specifically Welsh about their behaviour " This film does not depict Wales as such but an aspect of Wales that is present in any other Western city. A city where there is crime, violence and drugs but at the same time there is a lust for life, a buoyant spirit, and more than anything else a will to live. The movie keeps moving madly between larger-than-life realism and dark fantasy. At times the film is an enjoyable and we get to see a lively portrait of a Wales we rarely get to see today. But some parts are distorted, riddled with clichés, slapstick murders and even an impossible Moroccan ocean escape. That the movie represents the cultural identity of modern day Wales and not the traditional one is revealed beautifully in the conversation that takes place between the two corrupt police officers, Terry and Grevo as they stand in front of a building in Swansea. The words "ambition is critical" is written in brass letters on the sidewalk. Terry, asks Greyo what it means. To this Greyo replies that it is connected to the words of the poet Dylan Thomas who had referred to Swansea as "the graveyard of ambition" and "ugly lovely town." Terry finds these words senseless and replaces it with his own words "pretty shitty city." Though the movie presents a sordid picture of Wales, the people of Swansea are presented in a positive manner. In the movie you get to see an interesting vision of the low and high life of modern Welsh, the corrupt establishment, the mercenary adults, and the irresponsible, fun loving kids of today. Wales, even Scotland or Ireland for that matter, in movies is often identified with picturesque landscapes and emotion as seen in John Fords magnificent 1941 film How Green Was My Valley. But directors belonging to the younger generation are impatient with the past and want to showcase the energy, the spirit and probably even the irreverence that is prevalent is present day towns. Twin Town goes against the traditional values associated with rugby that of masculinity and Welshness and in the movie a rugby ball is actually used to hide cocaine. It is not rugby, considered by most as an integral part of Welsh life, but it is the football that inspires Julian and Jeremy. The dog, the brothers own is named Cantona, and the only other dog to appear in the film is named Fergie.. Through this the director has directly ridiculed the dominance of rugby in Welsh sporting life and culture. However though director Kevin Allen has nothing to do with the stereotyped images of Wales as a country of miners, choirs, daffodils and leeks and has been quoted as saying "I wanted to lay a few Welsh stereotypes to rest,” he does throw in a few clichés of his own. For example, he wrote a part especially for his brother Keith, the role of a sheep-shagger to confirm the slanderous old rumours that the Welsh are fond of their farm animals more than they ought to be. Again the memorable scene in which Bryn Cartwright, chairman of the local rugby club, describes a magnificent try by Phil Bennett in an infamous rugby match is actually a reference to a renowned moment, which is deep-rooted in the Welsh psyche. Also music and singing, which plays a dominant role in both Welsh films and Welsh life, has a major role in Twin Town. Cartwright’s daughter sings karaoke in a city bar and the brothers shameful act of urinating on her while she is singing sets off a chain of devastating acts of revenge. The traditional male voice choir also plays an important role in Twin Town. The choir is shown singing Myfanwy, at dusk at the Mumbles pier head at dusk, as the brothers bury their father at sea in deference to his wishes. This is a sort of victory over the corrupt local police force. Allen has been quoted as saying "I dont think theres a more genuine image of Welshness than a male Welsh choir." The films last scenes score a point. They portray a Welsh reality that is sour but not meaningless.The characters are trapped in the present and not in the past. The scenes of sparks from the fire darting across a monlight night are sights of visual beauty quite unlike the not so beautiful image of Swansea portrayed until then. There is even a Welsh flag. Similarly Kevin Allen in the opening scenes too tries to create a representation of Wales. In conclusion it can be said that although the film questions the importance of Welsh tradition, the closing sequence of the twins burying their father at sea with the male voice choir singing Myfanwy implies that perhaps there is a place and time for traditions. The scene where the twins carry out their last hideous act on a lovely and beautiful night on the shores of Swansea depicts contradiction. This contradiction of a hideous act and the beautiful night echoes the Welsh poet Dylan Thomass famous description of Swansea as being a "ugly lovely city." "Twin Town" portrays this three-word description of Swansea. It celebrates and at the same time rebukes Wales and its customs, its stupidity and its dignity. References 1. Wilmington Michael 1997, Chicago Tribune Retrieved from the website http://avalanchejournal.com/news/060697/tw Read More