Above-averagely attractive thing, more like. Good-looking thing, for sure, with some of the deepest, wettest, Pop Artiest reds and blues seen on screen since the 1960s work of Jean-Luc Godard (or of Jerry Lewis). The first film of Hettie Macdonald, who had directed the original Jonathan Harvey play on the English stage, is a combined coming-of-age and coming-out tale, about two working-class lads living cheek by jowl in a Southeast London housing project, and then sleeping feet by head in the same bed after one of them seeks refuge from his sadistic older brother and drunken, in addition to sadistic, father. This main center of interest lacks for nothing in taste and tact, but it might have lacked a little in interest had the radius not been widened to include, almost equally, some vivid peripheral figures: the single mother of one of the lads, a beleaguered barmaid whose modest dream is to manage a pub of her own, a full-blooded, fully rounded characterization by Linda Henry, maternal, sexual, limited in intelligence, formidable in raw feeling; her new, younger boyfriend (Ben Daniels), too young to be a father figure to her son, too old to be a buddy to him, with a rugged exterior but unforeseen inner expanses of mellowness and gooey sensitivity ("Do you have to use words like that? [Re: 'bird.'] It really disempowers you"); and the tarty black girl next door, who has an anachronistic affinity for the music of the Mamas and the Papas, and most particularly Mama Cass. The movie, among its other minor accomplishments, does for that lamented late-night snacker what Muriel's Wedding did for ABBA. It makes you hear the songs with new ears: "And belie-e-e-ve it or no-o-t,/ Now there's somethin' groovy and good 'bout whatever we've got.... " Glen Berry, Scott Neal, Tameka Empson. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd