Young Soul Rebels
Starring Valentine Nonyela, Mo Sesay
Directed by Isaac Julien
Produced by Nadine Marsh-Edwards
Reviewed by Alex Aitkin
The alternative film industry in Britain is alive and kicking. Isaac Julien, is black, British and now much better known as a result of this film, which won the Critic's Week Prize at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival.
Julien and Nadine Marsh-Edwards have created a film very much out of their personal experiences of London in the late '70s, and this is one of its great strengths. So concerned were they to give an authentic background to the plot, that not only the clothes, venues and music, but even the dances are period.
Set in 1977, the film centres on two black soul brothers, Chris and Caz, who are best friends and together run and DJ a pirate radio station known as Soul Patrol. Their forte is funk and soul music, which the commercial stations of the time refuse to broadcast.
The film opens with the murder of TJ, their gay friend who is killed in a park late at night. It is the queen's silver jubilee week, and part and parcel of the gushing patriotism are right-wing skinheads and the National Front, whose violence towards blacks and gays is rivalled only by that of the police.
While keeping their station alive, both Chris and Caz enter new relationships — Caz with Billibudd, a gay punk active in building a "Stuff the Jubilee" concert and Chris with Tracy, a production assistant at a commercial radio station who is angered by its conservative management. These relationships strain their friendship, as Caz wants Chris to be totally committed to Soul Patrol, while Tracy thinks he could go further. When Chris is framed and arrested for TJ's murder, the real murderer must be found.
Young Soul Rebels is packed with funk and soul music from '70s groups such as the Blackbyrds and Funkadelic, which rivals the action on the screen at times, and while it lightens up a potentially heavy atmosphere, the film is clearly trying to be two things at once. But if the plot and characters were not given all the fine tuning they could have had, what of it? Musically, it is great, and Isaac Julien makes the most of this.
As well as looking at the difficulties of being black and/or gay during this period, Young Soul Rebels explores and reveals the black culture of the time, while the innocent and intimate relationship shared by Caz and Billibudd has a depth to it that modern cinema rarely allows gays. Even more rarely allowed are gay sex scenes, which in this film are full on.
This film does not have the same classy feeling to it as, say, Do The Right Thing, nor has the director managed to keep the plot as firmly on its rails as could be wished, but it is a powerful piece of cinema that makes you forget where you are and lets you pretend to be somewhere else. And as it happens, 1977 is a funky place to be.