Tess (Emma Cooper) is dead from a drug overdose. The voiceover says 'Real life is difficult'. The interweaving stories do not all relate to Tess's death or even to each other. There is a bleak, surreal quality to this film both in the way it is shot and the people in it.

People, rather than characters, because in the midst of the desolation they seem real. The tendency is to want to know more about them and get bored with them at the same time. Most of the people in the stories - that follow snippets of their lives - do not call each other by name or talk much. Cutting between the narratives is confusing at first, but effective in creating a sense of the different characters in this world. There is a heightened reality in the noise people and objects make - it's unsettling.

Different generations engage in very different activities. The young take drugs, snog and feel sorry for themselves. The old try to re-kindle love or want to get outside for the last time before they die. There is travel at speed along a dark country lane or on a train. But the journeys don't lead anywhere. Everywhere there are people on the edge: love-making, drug taking, holding conversations off screen. There is stillness too. Painfully long close-ups and very slow tracking shots add to the sense of hopelessness. 'Are you coming to bed?' / 'No not yet' - the limit of one conversation between an old wife and an equally old husband. Later they discuss whether you can die of a broken heart.

'I want to go out,' says Nan (Patricia Loveland) to her granddaughter Gail (Rachel McIntyre). Gail, an agoraphobic, suggests a nice cup of tea. Eventually Nan prevails, enjoys the countryside and dies. Gail, though, has overcome her fear of 'the outside'. There is hope too for the other characters even if 'There's a three-month waiting-list for the Methadone programme'.

Music is used to separate the generations. Classical, 60-year-old pop music and more modern stuff play alongside the action, or lack of it, in a simplistic way. But a haunting piece of piano music put on the record-deck of a flat-bed music centre by an old man reconnects them all in their suffering. Perhaps the film should have ended here.

There are deaths of the old and of the young before the final voice-over. 'Why did she feel falling in love would make it any easier?' And a last shot of Gail, outside on her own at last, striding confidently into the middle-distance across a frozen ploughed field.

Better Things does not invite sympathy or identification with anyone in its unreal rural idyll. This makes it drag. Without a plot, it moves ploddingly forward. Compensations are the sparks of hope for 'better things' and the powerful observational camera-work - which engages and surprises.

CAST (imdb): www.imdb.com/title/tt0872245/

COMPANY: (imdb): www.imdb.com/title/tt0872245/

END

(c) Peter Andrews 2008

reviewed Sunday 30 November 08 / The Classic, Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012

www.fringereport.com