Glasgow Film Theatre,
11 March, 9pm; 2 March, 12.45pm.
Four stars
When Camden Town indie-dance tearaways Flowered Up released Weekender in 1992, this snarling thirteen-minute dance culture anthem caused all sorts of bother. The just shy of twenty-minute film accompanying the record’s urgent paean to 24/7 working-class hedonism probably didn’t help. Only Channel 4 had the bottle to show it, as the gutter press frothed with predictably sensationalist ire.
An early outing from video director WIZ, aka Andrew Whiston, Weekender charted a big night out for likely lad Joe, played by TV actor Lee Whitlock, with all the highs, lows, pills, thrills and bellyaches that ensued. Some of the film’s mix of social-realist grit and chemically enhanced dreamscape may resemble the bleakness of Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, with whom WIZ studied, but it also set the tone for a million mad-for-it movies to come. Danny Boyle apparently said there would have been no Trainspotting film without it.
Three decades on, first time director Chloe Jaunet has pulled together a series of rough and ready Zoom interviews recorded under lockdown to commemorate, not just the film, but the song that inspired it, the band who created it, and who should have by rights lasted a lot longer, and the era it defined in all its messy glory. Combined with previously unseen rushes from WIZ’s archive, the result is part social history, part working class tragedy, and part elegy for those missing in action.
The latter includes Flowered Up’s council estate poet Liam Maher and his guitarist brother Joe, having fallen prey to much darker substances. It is left to Anna Haigh, who played the film’s supermarket checkout girl turned clubland ‘E’ Queen, Flowered Up manager Des Penney and former band member Tim Dorney and dancer Barry Mooncult to unearth the past.
A roll call of fellow travellers, including Irvine Welsh, Bobby Gillespie, Shaun Ryder, filmmaker Lynne Ramsay and Jeremy Deller, highlight the socio-political backdrop of Thatcher’s Britain. Both Deller and Welsh point up the influence to Franc Roddam’s film of The Who’s mod odyssey, Quadrophenia, which tells a similar story, and is sampled on the record.
Clocking in at 72 minutes all in, Jaunet’s filmis as evocative and as urgent as its inspiration. It finishes, as it has to, with the original Weekender film’s mad rush of last-gasp life. Before that, the final words come from Whitlock, who quotes the song’s own prophetic last line. Given his recent death, I Am Weekender is Whitlock’s epitaph now as much as anyone else’s. Sorted.
The List, March 2023
ends
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