All entries for Monday 27 April 2009

Shifty – dealing out some realism

Title:

Shifty

Rating:

On Saturday I went to the late show of Shifty, and I’m so glad I did. It’s a performance-driven film, with outstanding turns by Daniel Mays, Nitin Ganatra and Riz Ahmed, who plays the title character. There’s something unsettlingly ordinary about the tone of the script, which essentially follows a pair of reunited friends who wander around a fictional London suburb as the drug-dealing Shifty goes about his daily business. For me, it really brought home the point that the use of illegal substances lives on all of our doorsteps. The unanswered question of why Chris left London four years previously gives an undercurrent for the story to travel on, and just as you get comfortable with the plodding pace of events, something comes in to take it up a notch without being excessive – an argument, a chase, a tidbit of information about the back-story.

Although I had figured out the final twist before the end, I still enjoyed this snapshot of a world that most of us would like to forget about. The impact as I left the cinema came from the simplicity of the message this film delivered in its matter-of-fact way: just one day in the life of a small-time drug-dealer, but so many broken lives and fractured relationships.

“24 hours to deal yourself out”, so says the film’s tagline – but this clever piece of cinema shows all too painfully how it’s never that easy.

V xx

: 27 Apr 2009 13:02 |  Tags: Movie Review |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem