Trash town?

IF it hadn't been for the huge success of Trainspotting, admits director Kevin Allen, his own debut film Twin Town, almost certainly would not have been made. The first film to cash in on last year's big British hit is set in dreary, tacky Swansea rather than bleak, junkie filled Edinburgh, but the similarities are obvious. Twin Town follows the exploits of Julian and Jeremy Lewis (Llyr Evans and Rhys Ifans), two drug addled, joyriding, dysfunctional brothers known as "the twins" (even though they aren't), whose search for revenge against a dodgy roofing contractor leads to a spiral of murderous retaliation.

Trainspotting's director Danny Boyle and producer Andrew McDonald gave their stamp of approval to Allen (who had a small part in their film, and whose brother Keith played the dead flat mate in Shallow Grave) by taking executive producer credits on Twin Town, giving the film the credibility that helped get it made. But, with its mix of soft porn, hard drugs, fart jokes and kitschy pop songs, this is a much trashier, cheaper looking film than its Scottish counterpart. I'm surprised, therefore, that Allen is so taken aback when I put it to him that Twin Town is the nearest thing yet to a Carry On film for Loaded readers. "I don't read Loaded, but I don't mind the Carry On bit. The film certainly wasn't made for a laddish audience, or with any particular audience in mind, and a lot of women like it. I suppose that we live in a laddish culture anyway.

Whatever audience Allen and co writer Paul Durden had in mind, it's clear that the film's producers, the entertainment group Polygram, are vigorously marketing Twin Town as this year's Trainspotting, complete with hip soundtrack album and lots of attitude. "I'd hope it's appealing to that new cinema audience that's been identified by the likes of Trainspotting," says Allen. "Polygram are a corporate machine, but they had the sense after Trainspotting to target that market. But I think anything that's stylised and, a bit kitsch is going to be described in those terms at the moment.

"We decided that we wanted to make a cinema film, rather than some worthy piece of social realism. But then again, there are social issues which I was interested in and certain truths I wanted to hang onto. It's a universal story, that could happen in any city in Europe. There's nothing new about businessmen doing cocaine deals, or bent cops fitting people up. You can use humour and drama to shroud anything, and entertain people. I don't have any problem with violence or death in the cinema."

Neither do I, most of the time, but there's one particular scene in Twin Town, which I raise with Allen, that encapsulates my uneasiness about his film. Looking for revenge, the twins sneak into a nightclub where Cartwright's daughter is competing in a karaoke competition, and urinate onto her from behind the stage. Do those women who admire the film really like this scene, which seems to this viewer to take sadistic pleasure in the image of male urine streaming down the face of a teenage girl?

Allen is unrepentant: "I would have taken it further if I could have got away with it. I would have used really hard porn on the karaoke video screen, but we wouldn't have got it past the censors. I never wanted anything the twins did to be diluted or tasteful; I wanted it to be as hardcore and nasty as possible, because that's where they're at. Essentially, among a lot of three dimensional characters, they're deliberately flat."

At several points during our conversation, Allen decries what he describes as "flag waving, issue led drama", but his own film appears to be caught in some sort of arrested adolescent rage against humanity in general. The stunted misanthropy and juvenile humour of Twin Town make one wonder what the film is actually about, and who will actually want to see it, no matter how powerful the marketing campaign. It's as if Allen had looked at Trainspotting and just not understood its wily meshing of disparate pop cultural strands with wit and sympathy. Twin Town's characters really are two dimensional Toons, their slap stick cruelty unleavened by humanity.

"I'm not interested in looking into their characters," says Allen. "They're representative of a certain kind of dysfunctional youth culture - out there, that's violent and f--ked up and out of control. Yeah, they're awful. When writing them, I never wanted to make them likeable. They were just there to work their way through my story."

One of the peculiar things about all this is the paradox between Allen's avowed desire to tap into the commercial cinema market and his resolute refusal in Twin Town to provide a character with whom the audience can identify. Has he not noticed that Renton in Trainspotting is a sexy, sympathetic character? There's nobody in Twin Town for whom the audience can feel similar affection, but Allen makes no apologies. Empathy, apparently, is a trap which he is happy to have avoided. "I'm not opposed to that classical structure, but you've got to break rules to get anywhere." This may be partly true, but it's the kind of truth that normally gets tested in first year at film school rather than on a commercial feature film.

A more interesting, if subordinate theme to the grotesqueness of modern life in Twin Town is that of Welshness. Just as Trainspotting used soccer (Archie Gemmill's famous World Cup goal) as a metaphor for all that was wrong with Scottishness, so Twin Town does the same with rugby's past glories as a symbol of Wales's impotence and self pity. "We realised we could have a side swipe at certain cliched English notions of Welshness," says Allen. "For a country to be renowned for its mines and its rugby is pretty sad, so it was a good opportunity to exploit those icons in a subversive way." Pointedly, it's a Scottish character, the bent cop Terry, who explodes the romantic myth of national heroism in the film. "I always knew I didn't want a Cockney doing that; it had to be a Celt. Another outsider."

So, does a film like Twin Town, which Allen insists would never have been backed by the "cultural purists" at S4C, represent part of a new wave of English language pop culture in Wales? "The linguistic and the geographical divides are still incredibly strong in Wales, but I think so. There's a real explosion of new Welsh bands, like Super Furry -- Animals and Catatonia at the moment, which deserves to be taken seriously, and we've used a lot of them on our soundtrack.

Brought up in Swansea by an English father and Welsh mother, Kevin Allen himself now lives in London. He sees his background as an advantage. "There's a real advantage to being an outsider. You can be a lot sharper about the places you know." Certainly, whatever their other merits or demerits, he agrees that the newer films coming out of Britain seem to have a stronger sense of regional and national identity than their predecessors, without getting bogged down in purist notions of authenticity. "I think both Trainspotting and Twin Town have that sense of place. The importance of that really shouldn't be underestimated."