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This blog has been contributed by Kieran Masterton, who seems to be drawn to the sadistic side of British cinema.

After last week's rather grim look at Nick Love's The Football Factory we follow English football violence with a rather more tongue-in-cheek Welsh flick.  Twin Town (1997), the first-time feature of director / co-writer Kevin Allen, is a film of unique perspective and a devilishly dark sense of humour.  Continuing the mini-series on contemporary films that draw from 'kitchen sink realism,' Twin Town is set in working-class Swansea, an old mining town on the South West Wales coast.  Since the mines closed in the 1980's, Swansea has, sadly, been chiefly known for its poverty and unemployment.  The film takes this grim reality and creates noir-flavoured comedy with the city right at its heart.

Twin Town is a black comedy set amongst the static-caravans, council estates, Victorian terraces and industrial landscape of the city.  The narrative follows 'the Lewis twins played by Rhys Ifans and his real-life brother Llyr Ifans.  The lads charge around Swansea in a wind selection of stolen cars, sniffing glue, smoking pot and terrorising the community.  It might seem odd, therefore, that they are in fact the heroes of the piece.  When the boys' father, 'Fatty' Lewis, falls off a ladder while working for local big-man Bryn Cartwright (William Thomas) the twins set out to get compensation.  Having received short shrift from tight-ass Cartwright the lads take the law into their own hands and a series of escalating reprisals ensue.  With wonderful Hitchcockian noir-thematics the boys are swept into a game of tit-for-tat that culminates in the death of their family and forces them to show the true face of retribution.

During all this violence and dodgy dealing there is also a phenomenal amount of comedic value, most of which is supplied by brilliant, larger than life characterisation and an exceptionally sarcastic sense of humour.  However, let there be no mistake, Twin Town is still as bleak as it gets.  The 'twins' live in a static-caravan site - what you yanks would call a trailer park.  Their main occupation is joyriding stolen cars.  Their mother doesn't work.  Their father claims benefits while working cash-in-hand.  Their sister is a prostitute and her regular customers include two local police detectives, one of which is played by the formidable Dougray Scott.  The police detectives’ role in proceedings are a complicated matter involving £40,000 worth of cocaine, a decapitated poodle and eventually a burial at sea.  Don't ask, you'll have to watch the film.

Mingled with KSR's are issues of tribalism, what it means to be Welsh, what it means to be a rugby supporter and class values.  The focus on the oppression of the working classes, the dark sense of humour, the tradition of male protagonists and angry young men are all alive and well in Twin Town.  Like with The Football Factory the twins represent a generation of young men that are complete dead beats - no backbone, no work ethic, no real problems in their lives accept the mundanity of it all.  In Nick Love's film, the youths cope with their problems by kicking the living daylights out of each other.  In Kevin Allen's film, they commit crime and cause a public nuisance for fun.  Both filmmakers use these social maladies to make statements about the state of the environments in which these young men have to grow up while simultaneously offering no answers - can any truly be given? - to the problem about the direction Britain is headed.

There may be some readers out there who feel that these type of films, especially The Football Factory, which deals with the football hooligan sub-culture, "wouldn't travel well," especially if you're an American viewer.  On a extremely superficial level, that might be true.  However, in my opinion, every single male born after World War II, whether they're English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish or American can find somewhere inside themselves something to empathise with the restless male characters in these films.  You are neither male nor human if you haven't longed for a sense of purpose and struggled at times with anger and frustration.

Here's a taste of the mundanity permeating the Ifans brothers' lives:

Next week, in the final installment of our mini-series on 'kitchen sink realism', Shane Meadows's wonderfully captivating This Is England.

Kieran Masterton is a postgraduate research student who has taught Film and Media at the University of Gloucestershire, UK.  His research interests include screenwriting, neo-noir, genre theory and the slasher genre.

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