Gerry McCarthy

The Sunday Times

 

It’s not Trainspotting and it’s certainly not The Courier. Flick, Fintan Connolly’s first feature film, is anything but a drug film. It’s a brisk, glossy drama about life in modern Dublin, where sex and drugs and violence are part of the background.

 

After more than a decade making documentaries, Connolly knows his subject. This is the first major Irish film to observe the drug culture dispassionately, without trying to comment on what it sees.

 

We first see Jack Flinter, played by David Murray, meeting a friend at Dublin airport. The friend, Des, played by David Wilmot, is suspiciously ashen-faced, and both of them look nervous. There is not much dialogue – everything is conveyed by nods and winks.

 

It soon becomes clear we are in the presence of a couple of amateur dope smugglers. Jack and Des have made an investment, taken a risk and broken the law. Their plan is to sell some of the hash to cover their costs and smoke themselves into oblivion with the rest. In the movies, if not in real life, it’s the kind of plan that invariably goes wrong, and the pair are quickly drawn into a netherworld for which they are conspicuously unprepared.

 

We begin to see differences between them, Jack lives with his girlfriend who has a job and a life and disdains the drugs scene. He has vague aspirations towards doing something artistic: dealing is just a stop-gap. Des, on the other hand, is impressed by the serious crooks and wants t impress them back. He wants to shed his middle-class roots and acquire street cred. He graduates from smoking hash to heroin. He is in too deep before he realises how dangerous his new life is.

 

In one superb montage, we see Jack in action as a drug dealer. He is more like a paranoid pizza delivery man than the pusher of the tabloid imagination. He meets a stressed executive and calls in to see a barman. He visits a film set with a “message” for a director. He gives credit. You get the impression he wouldn’t last long in a legitimate business.

 

The film-set scene is not a coy illusion to Hitchcock but a way for Connolly to ground his story in reality. When you are shooting a low-budget film it is also useful to be able to turn the camera on yourself. Only a documentary maker would have thought of this.

 

More than 10 years ago, Connolly made a series called No Comment that was shown by RTE. Radical at the time, it did exactly what it said – offered no interpretation. People simply described their lives. The series dealt with abortion, addiction, sex and drugs. The viewer got first-hand reports unmediated by an editorial voice.

 

No Comment spawned a series of follow-ups and Connolly has continued to make documentaries. He has recently finished working on one about refugees in Dublin, which is to be screened by RTE in January. But, he says, a couple of years ago he “got bitten by the drama bug” and decided to make a feature film.

 

“It was time to have a go,” he says, “to write a story with a view to directing it. I wanted to keep it simple, to tell a story of a man in trouble and what his particular problems are. They could be anybody’s with that lifestyle. I wasn’t trying to make any judgements about the characters, just reflect some of the things I had come across.”

 

Despite the realistic undercurrent, Connolly says social comment is not his ambition. As a first-time director, he was more concerned with working with actors. Whatever social comment a viewer might extract from Flick has the same non-judgemental quality as Connolly’s documentary work. It simply is – there is no need to moralise.

 

The story is fiction, a product of Connolly’s imagination. But he has whittled away much of the unnecessary baggage that novice film-makers sometimes indulge in. Visually, Flick is glossy and atmospheric, with the camera lingering on bodies and faces. There are superb set-pieces and characteristically energetic performances from Alan Devlin and Mannix Flynn. It has the pace and energy of a good thriller.

 

Murray is on screen almost all of the time. This, for Connolly, was a consequence of the decision to make the story Jack’s story. He had written scenes where other characters interact, and even shot a couple of them, but decided during editing that he didn’t need them.

 

Flick makes clear several points about drugs: the danger seems glamorous at first, then it turns ugly. People get beaten up, go to jail. People can die. But the film is not hysterical. It is the first Irish feature in which the everyday reality of a drug culture is taken for granted.

 

This matter-of-fact attitude should not be confused with ambivalence. Connolly invented a story about somebody who goes to the brink – and finds a way out. In real life, there isn’t always such a happy ending.