Kisses

Writer-director-photographer Lance Daly’s offering is not only highly derivative of a long-standing tradition of UK estate-trash films, it does not work particularly well in its own terms, being too obviously contrived to convince as realist portraiture or even convincing drama.

The story concerns two kids  Dylan and Kylie who run away from their abusive families for a night on the town in metropolitan Dublin. When Mike Leigh and Ken Loach first turned their cameras on this kind of  material thirty years ago it seared with its honesty but Kisses turns it into a Hansel and Gretel fable, padded out with a lot of artfully-shot footage and using a heavy-handed device of moving from black and white to colour and back to black and white again to ram home his point.

There have been many such films with fine performance from child actors such as that of Thomas Turgoose in This Is England (2006) but the two children here, Shane Curry and Kylie O’Neill, are at best serviceable. Daly labours his title with some improbable explication (and an ill-judged close-up of the kids French kissing), makes a mess of an extended scene in which Kylie is abducted, and probably the only gripping thing about the story, the question of what is going to happen to Kylie when she gets home, is completely abandoned.

More art-house than realist, Kisses has enough good material for a pop video for the group Go Blimps Go that provide the groovy soundtrack.

DVD Extras: Making-of featurette: Theatrical trailer

Available from: Madman

 

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