Broken

Synopsis: Skunk (Lily James) is a young girl living in a cul-de-sac somewhere in London. Her neighbours on one side re mentally ill, and on the other, out-of-control teenagers. She navigates her way around this situation with the slowly diminishing innocence of a child growing up.

George Lucas is quoted in Peter Biskind’s excellent book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls as having once said that eliciting emotion from an audience was easy, all you need to do is get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck. Broken, to me, feels like somebody lining up a bunch of kittens and systematically torturing them, hoping people will react appropriately. It’s a cynical and manipulative work hiding behind deceptively light camerawork and a couple of remarkable performances. In short, I really didn’t like the film. About half an hour in I seriously considered walking out, I just wasn’t interested in being made to feel bad just for the sake of it, but I stuck around to see if there was some kind of point to it all. No such luck.

The performances are all stellar and Lily James as Skunk stands out as amazing. Tim Roth as her father gives a nuanced delivery as a quiet man who is still capable of standing up for right even when it gets a little scary. The two stars I’ve given the film have a direct correlation to those previous two sentences. But many of the other characters are paper-thin caricatures designed more for their function in the plot than to be felt as real people. The actors are solid but their parts are just underwritten. The bratty children next door are intriguing but mostly one-dimensional, and their violently over-protective father seems to be nothing more than a facile attempt to argue that occasionally bad people are capable of good. Nothing wrong in the argument but the delivery is so underdone it’s laughable.

Broken has won awards and been acclaimed as a gritty tale of urban decay and the fracturing of our social fabric or some such nonsense like that. My take is that the emperor has no clothes and in the hope that no-one will notice is molesting small animals.

 

 

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