Movie Reviews

Human Traffic

27 Jan 2000

Human Traffic tells the pointless but entertaining story of five Cardiff youths, whose lives revolve around sex, drugs and... um, that's about it. Writer-director Justin Kerrigan portrays the British youth scene in a chaotic style, accompanied by a constant hip-hop beat.

The publicity describes this as "Trainspotting meets Go", and it obviously hopes to be as "cool" as those movies. Juice Magazine will probably name it as one of this year's best films, and Triple J announcers will no doubt fall in love with it. Here is one more look at the "chemical generation", in all its excess.

Actually, the pill-popping ravers of Human Traffic are probably no more typical of nineties youth culture than the nomadic hippies of Easy Rider were typical of sixties youth. It was "the scene" in those days, but if you speak to anyone who was around back then, they were almost certainly doing something else.

The narrator, Jip (John Simm, of the TV show The Lakes), is a disillusioned youth, the son of a prostitute. Most of the movie takes place on a Friday night, as he visits a night club and takes ecstasy with his equally directionless friends. The film doesn't romanticise drug use; the lows of pill-popping follow the highs, though they are given less time because they're not as funny. The characters even accept how meaningless it all is, and that they don't want to do it forever.

We see the world through the eyes of this small group. This sometimes means that the grittiness of Trainspotting is replaced by surrealism, such as when Nina (Nicola Reynolds), who works in a fast-food restaurant, sees her fellow workers turning into robots; or the scene when Jip thinks of new, updated lyrics for God Save the Queen and (in his imagination) proceeds to sing them in a pub, joined in the second verse by everyone else. When they start the drugs, of course, it becomes even more peculiar.

For all this, Human Traffic remains a very believable, and very funny, cultural record - even if, as with Saturday Night Fever or Ferris Bueller's Day Off, coming generations will probably look at the people in this film and say: "What were they thinking?"