An interesting film, certainly worth seeing for the acting and atmosphere alone, and would make a good double feature with the equally ambiguous Morvern Callar. Indeed Young Adam seems like some kind of cross between that film and Camus' The Stranger. In it Ewan Macgregor plays Joe, an aimless drifter working on a barge with a slowly unfolding connection to a dead woman he and his co-worker find floating on the river they work.
spoilers:
It would be easy to dismiss the film as pretentious, or complain that nothing much happens, but what I found fascinating was the way that what happens in the movie is not as important as what it reveals about Joe. He is a guy who at one point claims to want to write a novel, claims he wants to travel to China, but none of these things have any reality. It's like he's trying to fill in the gaps in his personality with something grand or exotic, but there's no intention behind them. He's empty, and the only way he can fill that emptiness is sex, which he doesn't really enjoy either. It's the only thing that appears to drive him, but as sex without emotional connection is about as good an illustration of the finite as you could possibly imagine, it is both what he lives for and what he uses to make a shambles of any life he could build.
Joe goes (in flashback) from having a perfectly nice relationship with a pretty and charming young woman to displacing the husband and father figure in a sad dysfunctional family all because he was trying to avoid that kind of domestication in the first place. And of course he moves on from there, but only to more of the same, all while witnessing how his past behavior has had a pretty major role in the death of his ex girlfriend and the downfall of a man he doesn't know, but who with a word he could save. He makes a halfhearted and distanced attempt, that obviously doesn't work, and in the end he has 2 deaths weighing on what bit of conscience he has, and no more clue as to how to find meaning in a world he obviously has yet to find a purpose in.
Young Adam might be nothing new, and may not amount to much.... but in illustrating a kind of existential emptiness that everyone has felt from time to time it certainly delivers.
spoilers:
It would be easy to dismiss the film as pretentious, or complain that nothing much happens, but what I found fascinating was the way that what happens in the movie is not as important as what it reveals about Joe. He is a guy who at one point claims to want to write a novel, claims he wants to travel to China, but none of these things have any reality. It's like he's trying to fill in the gaps in his personality with something grand or exotic, but there's no intention behind them. He's empty, and the only way he can fill that emptiness is sex, which he doesn't really enjoy either. It's the only thing that appears to drive him, but as sex without emotional connection is about as good an illustration of the finite as you could possibly imagine, it is both what he lives for and what he uses to make a shambles of any life he could build.
Joe goes (in flashback) from having a perfectly nice relationship with a pretty and charming young woman to displacing the husband and father figure in a sad dysfunctional family all because he was trying to avoid that kind of domestication in the first place. And of course he moves on from there, but only to more of the same, all while witnessing how his past behavior has had a pretty major role in the death of his ex girlfriend and the downfall of a man he doesn't know, but who with a word he could save. He makes a halfhearted and distanced attempt, that obviously doesn't work, and in the end he has 2 deaths weighing on what bit of conscience he has, and no more clue as to how to find meaning in a world he obviously has yet to find a purpose in.
Young Adam might be nothing new, and may not amount to much.... but in illustrating a kind of existential emptiness that everyone has felt from time to time it certainly delivers.
