I was the ultimate sceptic going to see Human Traffic at the Savoy this week. There have been weeks of hype about this "new Trainspotting" - the first movie to capture the youth Zeitgeist and so on. The more I heard, the more convinced I was that Human Traffic would be unlikely to catch anything more than a rake of column inches and a few fashion editorials. The media machine loves to eulogise films, books and TV series and examine, in a pseudo-sociological manner, the way in which they have definitively captured the essence of the "youth of today". The only problem is that most chronicles of yoof in the 1990s, or indeed yoof at any time, is that the yoof who are being chronicled find it cringe-inducing in the extreme.
Indeed, most people I know would be in Zeitgeist-ish agreement that nothing is quite so naff as a depiction, be it on page or screen, of a supposedly typical night out on the town. Most of them consist of a crowded pub/party/club scene with everybody dressed in wacky, young-people outfits - short psychedelic dresses, dyed hair, body piercings - and small groups talking animatedly as though they've already dropped large amounts of drugs. I have a bit of an inside track on this as a few years ago I did work as an extra on a yoof-oriented movie being shot in Dublin. At a time when large amounts of us were lounging around the town doing nothing much, a casting call for "trendy young people" seemed like money for old rope.
We were told to turn up wearing exactly what we would wear to a "cool" party, except they'd appreciate it if we didn't wear black. So obviously, realism was out the window from the start as your average "cool" party is usually a sea of blackboard, coal, india ink, bin-liner and night-sky i.e. anything so long as it's black. I arrived wearing a red skirt that barely grazed my buttocks, a red and white vest and a pair of high heels - not because it was what I would wear to a party but because with the inherent cynicism of the young, I knew that was what middle-aged people would think I would wear to a party, and I really needed the money so I could go to a party that night.
Still the wardrobe people weren't quite sure about whether I looked trendy enough so they popped a red hair band on my head, gave me two pigtails and a whole load of blue eye-shadow before they released me on to the set. There, we were instructed to behave naturally - you know, talk animatedly, dance continually, and if anybody knew how to roll jazz cigarettes, could they collect some tobacco and cigarette papers from props please?
It was a fairly pleasant if surreal day; I got cash in hand and the only problem was that I didn't have time to change before heading on to my party and so spent the night explaining why I was in fancy dress. The film, on the other hand, bombed.
This experience seems to be typical of most filmed or written descriptions of young people and the ways in which they socialise. E had a terrifyingly cheesy scene where about 20 young people gathered in broad daylight to have a rave on a beach - jumping up and down around a ghetto-blaster at 8pm looking desperately embarrassed. There are endless references to skinning up and being pissed and criminal amounts of phrases like "hanging out", "chilling out" and "putting out" and they convince nobody under the age of 50. The only youth films that appeal to youth seem to be ones so set apart by geography (the spate of American teen flicks this summer), experience (Trainspotting) or time (Last Days of Disco) as to be windows rather than mirrors on reality. Still, it is perhaps a little unfair to blame directors and writers, as catching the youth Zeitgeist always seemed to me to be an impossible task. For a start, trends change at a furious rate, and the year-and-a-half it takes for a book to be published or a film to be made can turn a contemporary snapshot into a retro throwback.
But the other problem with trying to capture the social habits of the young is that the very act of committing them to paper or celluloid usually renders them redundant. The whole point about any good night out is the intensity of the moment - at some point you usually go off on an internal monologue about how this is the best night of your whole life and about how you wouldn't be anywhere else in the world but here, now. By the next Wednesday, you can't quite remember where you were or who you were talking to. Socialising is ephemeral - that is both its pleasure and its limitation. Yet half way through Human Traffic, I realised that this was a film that had managed the unmanageable, at least to some extent. The audience was made up of people the same age as the actors, they wore similar gear to the characters, and without fail they laughed at the same things as the people on the screen. Sure there were some of the same old problems - a party scene where everybody seemed to wear feather boas and dance on the stairs, an over-reliance on hip-speak and a self-consciousness about its own trendiness - but this was a film that actually had some resonance in real life. Where Human Traffic and its director Justin Kerrigan have succeeded and others have failed is to realise that while youth culture can be vacuous, hedonistic and glib, it does have its own frame of reference. As the film tilts through one weekend on the town with a group of Cardiff clubbers, the five characters drop as many references to Tarantino, chat shows, Trainspotting, Bill Hicks and jungle music as they do tabs of E.
It's hardly a new phenomenon - writers have always used myth as a way of widening their context and appealing to a community of readers - but Human Traffic has picked up on the manner in which popular culture has replaced classical myth as a method of establishing group identity. It may not be the best film on release but Human Traffic has at least recognised that there is some element of a culture in supposed youth culture.