I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning: A Review of a British Weepie
Clio Barnard's latest film, "I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning," is a group of lads' journey through addiction, housing precarity, class tensions, and romantic betrayal. It's a film that aims to evoke big emotions and anti-capitalist rage, but in execution, it falls short of its ambitious scope. The film is a choppy outline of five working-class lives in the U.K., adapted from the novel of the same name by Kieran Goddard. The script, written by Enda Walsh, shifts between five characters, a clan of childhood besties in their thirties still clinging to their hard-partying ways.
One of the main characters, Patrick, is a politically opinionated food delivery courier living with his high school sweetheart-now-wife, Shiv, and their two young daughters in an inner-city estate. Their neighbors include Oli, a loveable goofball who deals heroin to make ends meet, and Conor, whose struggles with alcohol intensify as his pregnant wife, Sophie, nears her due date. Conor is also managing the construction of a new high-rise, following in the footsteps of his entrepreneur father, in the hopes that the project will change his family's financial situation.
The film's soundtrack is a warm bath of nostalgia, paired with groovy techno tracks and a propulsive electronic score by Harry Escott. The cinematography is gliding and rhythmic, establishing the friends' joyous camaraderie and boozy loss of control. However, the performances give life to the characters, but the script is laughably heavy-handed in the way it stakes out the themes and rushes through character arcs.
One minute, Oli is passing out at lunch from excessive drug use, the next he's changed by a run-in with the small daughter of one of his clients, and adopts a dog that puts his life back on track. We're constantly reminded of Conor's alcohol abuse by the mounting number of empty bottles in his office, and Rian's short-lived relationship with a Kate Middleton lookalike seems destined to fail from their first dating-app meetup.
The film's clunky edit, which gives little room for the performances to breathe and play out organically within their contexts, makes the frictions between the characters feel stilted and juvenile. Barnard gives bleak scenarios a stirring kind of hopefulness, an effect achieved by the cast's breezy chemistry, but the film as a whole slumps in weird tonal directions that give its tragedies and resolutions a muted, shrugging quality.
In my opinion, the film might have worked better in serialized form. While the performances give life to the characters, the script is too heavy-handed and rushed, and the film's tonal direction is inconsistent. Nevertheless, the film continues Barnard's character-driven social-realist agenda, and it has a fair shot at theatrical play outside the U.K.
