It’s not often that an opportunity comes along like this to compare and contrast two films that outwardly have so much in common yet are so different. They boast similar subject matter, settings, devices, and music, come from first-time writer/directors, utilize essentially unknown casts, found audience on the festival circuit, and even feature recommendations for each other on their Blockbuster cases. But one is British, the other Californian; you might as well compare an Aston Martin DB7 to a Pinto, or a soccer riot to a soap opera.
Human Traffic, Justin Kerrigan’s autobiographical ode to friendship, romance, youthful invulnerability, sexual angst, and recreational designer-drug use, plays out over the course of one weekend in the rave and party scene around Cardiff, Wales (he felt setting it in London would be cliché). As if all successful new English directors come from a secret school where they learn to recycle and amplify the best ideas from Trainspotting, it opens with a familiar roll call of main characters, beginning with the narrator. But from there it takes off on an outrageous excursion of asides, daymares, and dance and sing-along fantasies, spewing energy like overly agitated Guinness. Everybody waxes glib and hilarious about what drives and terrifies them as middle-class working kids reluctantly clawing their way toward responsibility, desperately trying to outrun adulthood while embracing hyperbole and “spliff politics.” Kerrigan manages to out-locomotive Trainspotting, and in the process earned a British Academy Award nomination for “Most Promising Newcomer” and a three-picture deal from Miramax. A-
Against such a model, Groove, written and directed by Greg Harrison (not the actor), seems rather static and sedate even though it spends much more time on the dance floor – same flavor, weaker strength. Also chronicling a pivotal weekend in the lives of a character ensemble, it starts with a San Francisco rave promoter’s frantic efforts to get the daunting technical and logistical problems of his clandestine warehouse venue squared away (when his beleaguered electrician comments, “110 feels like a codeine overdose; 220 feels like you’re falling out of a moving car,” you’re not sure if he’s talking voltage or beats per minute). Gadgetry, good karma, and lenient law enforcement prevail (if Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland had been born 60 years later, you could almost see them starring in this: “Hey, kids! Let’s put on a rave!”), allowing a socially stunted technical writer, attending at his younger brother’s urging, to lose his chemical virginity and meet the girl of his dreams.
Maybe it’s a cultural thing, wherein English kids are instructed in the finer art of verbal hooliganism, because Groove never rises above the realm of a dehydrated, dilated-pupil melodrama with more hugging than a Dharma class reunion. It’s peopled by uncomfortable, annoying characters and would be a general waste of time did it not give a pretty interesting look at how the deejays artfully spin their vinyl, including neolegendary English mixmaster John Digweed. So while it did play at several festivals, including the Sundance 2000 gig that garnered it a distributor, this well-intended project’s resume is, unlike Human Traffic’s, conspicuously short on awards. C-