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Films like Kidulthood are derivative, cliched and toxic

Imagine this scene. I walk into a film producer’s office in west London. I say to them: “I have a really good script, ‘man’. It’s going to do the business, me and my spars have made it proper ghetto!”

The white and Asian producers fresh out of their year at the BBC, turn to me and say:

“Well you’ve come to the right place… the only films getting options now are urban, edgy and street. We want the next Bullet Boy.”

In seconds, I’m reading them my new film script called I’m So Bad, That I’m Badder Than The Rest. They just love it. A story about a black guy who is trapped in a gangster lifestyle, where the black girls get pregnant, the white girls are ‘slags’ and my black hero dies in a gang bang. And don’t forget the many shots of nasty housing estates.

My two producers snap it up and soon the white critics are saying that I’m the new black Guy Ritchie.

GRITTY

Like waiting for a bus that never seems to come, films with a predominantly black cast are rare. Then two or three show up all with the same theme – ‘gritty, urban, gang-bang drama’. The new film Kidulthood is no exception. I won’t spoil the storyline, only to say that you’ve heard it before. What is clear is that, although the script was written by the very talented Noel Clarke, our media image is still determined by the interests of middle-class white and Asian producers.

I am not interested in sitting down in a cinema and looking at a bunch of black people singing ‘kum by yah’ and then saying ‘wow what positive black people.’ However, why is it that my total black television and cinema experience has to do with the so called ‘urban underbelly’?

Surely a good film is driven by a strong story. What we seem to have is a British version of African American gang–banging movies, with Brit hip-hop as the cool back drop. This is fine but you still need a tale and characters (not caricatures) to keep us awake.

Kidulthood will soon be joined on the mean streets of cinematic London by the young cast of The Lives of Saints, set in and around the hard-knock environs of Haringey, and by the ex-con and So Solid Crew front-man Ashley Walters in Life’n’Lyrics, a tale of tribal conflict between DJs in north and south London.

COPY

I always think that there are two lives we live as black and working-class – ‘the real life’ and the one projected by the white film producer/ critic who now lives in Brixton and so can tell us what it really is like to be ‘urban’.

What worries me is that our young people may well be living a copy of a copy. We have seen this in the way MTV have made a pale copy of so-called ‘black reality’ only to have a set of young people copy that copy. So what does it really mean to keep it real?

One of the scenes that I found most amusing in Kidulthood was when one of the characters, dressed as if he had just rolled out of a rap video, was busy trying to hail a black cab. No cabbie would stop for him. And you know what, if I was a cabbie, I wouldn’t pick him up either. Yet this was perhaps the only time, when the film became political, this was meant to show how racist Britain was.

Sadly it failed because the real racism is the unwillingness to give us our own black Harry Potter or Leroy Pottinger.

Why should our children always have to sit through the urban grime of reality and not have some childhood fantasy? Why is this only left for middle–class white children?

According to the naïve Observer critic Miranda Sawyer, Kidulthood gives us the real life of the streets and is so cool.

She says: “This is no finger-wagging get-thee-to-a-Jobcentre film, though, but a refreshing, energetic, modern movie that documents urban teenagers’ lives with wit and vigour. Slicker and less worthy than last year’s acclaimed Bullet Boy, Kidulthood has been described as London’s City of God: it’s not quite that, but it’s a good sight closer to that kinetic portrait of street life than Love Actually. Kidulthood and its talented team of actors showcase what this country is really good at - anti-authoritarianism, music and lust.”

There seems to be a strange contradiction here over so-called ‘street life’ – it is meant to be brutish, nasty and short but it is full of wonderful rebellion, music and lust.

For those who live it, it’s probably neither. Most of it is spent just hanging around – doing nothing and feeling bored. Not the stuff of great movies I’m afraid.

Published: 09 March 2006
Issue: 1208

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