“Think of me when you look at yourself with undying love, C.” So reads the inscription on the small mirror that Cathy (Emily Mortimer) gives Joe (Ewan McGregor). Used to shave, it’s eventually discarded into the canal like his typewriter, his lover, and his own existence. The murky still Scottish waters, along which barges pull their cargos of coal, is where Joe abandons his old life, one piece at a time. He has aspirations to be a writer. Ambitions to travel to China. A habit of mercilessly screwing women. All of these things, except the last, are consumed by the canal, which, unlike the mirror, reflects little.

Why is Joe, a Fifties Edinburgh bohemian, so fascinated by forsaking his middle-class existence to become a coal shoveller? Is it that he has given up writing? The suspect finality to his gesture of sinking the typewriter accidentally leads to him slumming it on the barge, hard work and scant privacy from the family who own the vessel, but one could barely say that he has given up being a writer. The body of Cathy, which he discovers at the opening of the film (her slip and shape reveal who she is, though we never see the corpse’s face), is described by Joe in an affected author’s style to the barge’s dinner table. That ostentatious oratory suggests that he knows and cares about how she came to be there. But also mimics a wannabee creative’s verbal posturing, willing to cast his meager talent for the handling of words over the death of a girl. We know from the flashbacks that he has not been born and bred slogging on the canals. It is a path of life he has accepted as a two-finger salute to his previous existence as a kept writer. Or perhaps there is a pretentious motive behind his embrace of grime, sweat and poverty? Doing what he does not know, so he can write from experience when he returns to his submerged typewriter.

David Mackenzie has become quite talked about in the UK—a new great British hope to save us from becoming a twee location for Hollywood productions and the occasional incongruous big screen television drama by Loach, Leigh, or Shane Meadows. His first film, the grim, excellent, foreboding The Last Great Wilderness (also 2003) was an entertaining dogme-styled piece that constantly threw its audience off guard with abrupt tone shifts. Despite it being the most interesting British debut since Christopher Nolan’s Following (1999) the Brit-crits didn’t warm to it. Yet his new film, in spite of having the rare backing of the generally self loathing UK cinephile mafia, has failed to reach a mass audience over there. It’s nothing to do with McGregor, Mullan, or Swinton’s pitch black turns; us Brits have been known to lap these up with soup spoons previously. No, it’s the film’s wayward structure that’s the key culprit for the venture’s cold reception box-office. Word of mouth is never going to spread for a dark film that openly tries to confuse its audience and come across as pretentious to the Joe and Joanna Publics turning up to see Ewan’s notorious “Moulin Purple.” The culpable random time shifts seem to have little to do with the cinematic experience except to continue what Mackenzie previously did so well: keep the viewer in the dark. The only difference here is they might not be satisfied when things are illuminated. So let’s look at the reasons behind Young Adam’s waves of non-chronology.

The flashbacks to Joe’s happier more creative life have such a lack of order they could merely be dreams and aspirations. Perhaps he never owned the typewriter he ditches, never fucked and walked out on the faceless body that becomes Cathy. Maybe this is not an author repelling from his artistic ambitions of getting back to reality by working a real man’s shift and rutting with the various wives of the working class, shown in unappetizing shots of flies on their tits and teeth greyed by a regular soaking in gin. The unnamed body could be the spark of inspiration to get this young man inventing a narrative in his head. The story of the writer he secretly wants to become would tell. First he fills in how they knew each other, gives her a name (Cathy), then consumes his desire for her. Then he needs to fill in the blanks: Why is he no longer with this slip wearing woman who loves him? How did she die?

The flashbacks are defiantly achronological; are they are an amateur novelist’s attempts to make sense of his tale? Each piece falling into place to explain the anomalies between his reality and daydreamed flashbacks. This may explain their anachronistic nature. May explain why Mackenzie sets most of his film in a twilight lit timescape. May explain why Joe’s writer fantasy self begins to reject his romantic vision of domestic bliss with his fictional Cathy. Their relationship disintegrates because he knows she has to reach her eventual gloomy fate. It also runs parallel with Joe’s real predicament on the barge. His affair with the wife and mother of the family, Ella (Swinton), sees him becoming the paternal figure on the boat, the man of the house. He rejects such a position in the story within his head, he rejects the superficial responsibilities that his Cathy wants to see him take, emphasizing it with some rough sex involving ketchup and custard. In reality, the after effects of his grim rutting with Ella see him having to play the family man.

As the author, Joe controls this narrative, he lays the blame at his own door for Cathy’s death. Is he responsible? That would be revealing too much. But as the guilt swells inside him, the guilt of a writer who has created a life for the corpse he dragged out of the canal, knowing full well he would have to take it away again, he assumes a stance similar to the narrator in Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart.” Full of self hate for his sin that he desperately needs to confess for his crime, while the reality of what happened to the young woman who died is played out in court with another man awaiting the gallows. The ever-excellent McGregor, finally filling his boots again in a serious role, masterfully projects all this internal turmoil. His character’s vacant nihilism and misogyny is stripped away to show a cipher of a man. Mackenzie cleverly plays with the grey areas of Trocchi’s rather banal source material to produce a film that is tough going for the casual viewer. At times, Young Adam can be far too conceited, far too morose, far too uncritical of its protagonist’s self-importance. Yet its narrative ambiguities and fascinating structural tricks will haunt the mind for ages afterwards. Like the mirror that Joe uses to shave with, it reflects the narcissism and disgust of those who are arrogant enough to place themselves within their own troubling fictions.
—BOB CARROLL

Young Adam opens in New York and Los Angeles April 16, 2004