Brawny and Clyde

Pasolini's Salo features in its credits a list of books for further reading. The press notes for Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen contain a short essay on poverty in Scotland and its effects on children, citing four official publications and including some hair-raising facts. These statistics might well have been appended to the picture itself, because this carefully researched movie is intended to illustrate through the lives of individuals some larger problems of unemployment and the erosion of community.

Sweet Sixteen is Loach's fourth collaboration with the screenwriter and radical lawyer Paul Laverty, and the third set in west Scotland. Its title is heavily ironic. As he approaches his sixteenth birthday, life is anything but sweet for Liam (Martin Compston), a working-class lad from Greenock, the former shipbuilding town at the head of the Clyde estuary. Surrounded by sea and mountains, Greenock's magnificent setting contrasts painfully with the misery of its citizens, who were once held together on the 'Red Clyde' by the dreams of a socialist future.

Loach has a way with actors and the non-professional Compston gives a performance as attractive as the one David Bradley gave as the doomed Billy in Kes. Liam has been excluded from school and lives by selling drugs and stolen cigarettes with his tearaway friend Pinball. His drug-addicted mother is in jail after taking the rap for her brutal lover, Stan, a loser with ambitions. Stan and his henchman, Liam's weak drunken grandfather, are beyond redemption, but the cheeky, rebellious Liam lives in innocent hope of keeping his mother clean and sober. He also dreams of reconciling her with his sister, Chantelle, a 17-year-old unmarried mother with ambitions of becoming a computer operator and breaking away from her background.

This being a Loach movie we know from the start that Liam, for all his inherent decency, is bound to fail, and sure enough his life is one damned thing after the other. When he refuses to smuggle Stan's drugs into his mother's jail, he is beaten up (the first of numerous bloody beatings he takes) and kicked out of his grandfather's house. Undeterred, he saves enough for a down payment on a small caravan beside the sea - his idea of an idyllic place for his mother to recover in - only to have it burnt by an arsonist.

Ironically it is his vitality and resilience that ultimately destroy him, when he is taken up by the coolly menacing Clydeside godfather who runs the local rackets, using - a neat touch this - a smart health club as headquarters for his activities. Like the young would-be criminals in Scorsese's Mean Streets and Goodfellas, Liam is put to the test and inducted into the underworld. Very specifically, he is ordered to dispose of his dangerously unreliable sidekick, the way Harvey Keitel must deal with the reckless loose cannon played by Robert De Niro in Mean Streets. At 15, Liam is entrusted with running a pizza joint that uses the distribution of junk food as a cover for the home delivery of drugs. With this go the keys to a pleasant flat overlooking the river where mum can live when she gets out and sister Chantelle can move into with little Callum.

This would have made a sufficiently forceful ending, as powerful a moral indictment of a corrupt and corrupting society as one could ask for. Unfortunately Loach and Laverty can't resist another couple of turns of the screw, one of them unnecessarily melodramatic. And they end on what since Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups 40 years ago has been an overfamiliar image - the young hero on a beach looking at the sea and contemplating the vast nothingness of his future.

There is less direct confrontation with a larger society here than in most Loach movies - no indifferent bureaucrats, no mocking of the prison service, a single comic encounter with the police, the bourgeoisie seen only as clients of the smart health club. The movie centres on a divided working class exploiting one another, constantly engaging in physical and verbal abuse. There seems to be no way out of it, and hanging together as a family is shown to be an illusion. Yet one is reminded of a remark by Chekhov about his fellow writers that Graham Greene quoted with approval several times in his film criticism: 'The best of them are realistic and paint life as it is, but because every line is permeated, as with a juice, by an awareness of purpose, you feel, beside life as it is, also life as it ought to be, and this captivates you.'

Loach's documentary realism has at times led him to let his actors use accents and dialects that verge on the unintelligible to audiences outside Britain, and often those within it. That verge is frequently crossed in Sweet Sixteen and the movie begins with an announcement that the first 15 minutes are subtitled (this even extends to turning Tam into Tom) - 'after that you're on your own like Liam - nae problem'. It's more a distracting joke than a satisfactory solution. Clearly audiences on the Continent, where Loach finds his main audience, will be better off, seeing it dubbed or subtitled in their own languages. One now wonders whether Mel Gibson is making up for rendering his medieval Scots intelligible in Braveheart by shooting his biblical movie, The Passion, in Latin and Aramaic without subtitles.