Possibly a one-hundred-percent accurate portrait of the drug-culture riffraff of the Notting Hill district, but given the dialect, the slang, and the quality of the recorded sound, no more than seventy-five percent of it comes through as comprehensible. And the scope of the portrait is, in the first place, narrower than it reasonably needed to be. First-time director Hanif Kureishi (twice writer for Stephen Frears on My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid) has an alert eye for the people and their clothes (sort of Salvation Army Chic) but not much of a one for the places, even for the most textbook Establishing Shot. Then, too, the attention to a ragtag team of drug pushers and users comes to seem somewhat overattentive for a class of people whom one class member describes -- and not uncharitably on the evidence -- as "boring, small-minded, stupid." What there is in the way of a story -- what there is that might have forcibly imposed some interestingness onto the subject -- revolves around the quest of one unprosperous pusher who calls himself Clint Eastwood (Justin Chadwick, with Young George Harrison good looks) for a pair of decent shoes on which depends his attempt to go "straight": i.e., to land a job as a waiter. Kureishi, though, is much more an observer and a chronicler than a dramatizer or storyteller, and the action is much more repetitive than propulsive. Bits of oddball humor liven things up intermittently without reassuring us of the accuracy of observation. With Steven Mackintosh and Emer McCourt. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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