The group of lads at the center of Clio Barnard’s “I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning” dance their way through addiction, housing precarity, class tensions and good old romantic betrayal. In theory, the British director’s fifth feature — premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes — is a film of big, bubbling emotions and anti-capitalist rage. In execution, it’s a choppy outline of five working-class lives in the U.K. cobbled together by gloopy sentimentality. The ingredients for a pounding kitchen-sink melodrama are here, but nothing really matches the scalding imagery evoked by the title — and scattered throughout via archival footage of the dozens of high-rise housing towers demolished in Birmingham, where the film is set, since the turn of the century.
Adapted from the novel of the same name by Kieran Goddard, the script by Enda Walsh (“Small Things Like These”) shifts between five characters, a clan of childhood besties in their thirties still clinging to their hard-partying ways. Patrick (Anthony Boyle), a politically opinionated food delivery courier, lives with his high school sweetheart-now-wife, Shiv (Lola Petticrew) and their two young daughters in an inner-city estate. Their neighbours include Oli (Jay Lycurgo), a loveable goofball who deals heroin to make ends meet, and Conor (Daryl McCormack), whose struggles with alcohol intensify as his pregnant wife Sophie (Lucie Shorthouse) nears her due date.
Conor is also managing the construction of a new high-rise, following in the footsteps of his entrepreneur father in the hopes that the project will change his family’s financial situation. He’s receiving crucial investment money from Rian (Joe Cole), the only member of the group who has managed to break out of Birmingham. Living in a sterile condo in London after scoring big-time with online stock warrants, Rian feels out of touch with his posh new surroundings.
The soundtrack is a warm bath of nostalgia (The Paragons, The Proclaimers) paired with groovy techno tracks and a propulsive electronic score by Barnard’s regular collaborator Harry Escott. A ramshackle opening sequence at Oli’s 30th birthday almost feels like a musical number thanks to cinematographer Simon Tindall’s gliding, rhythmic camerawork, establishing at once the friends’ joyous camaraderie and boozy loss of control.
There’s a tenderness to the film that aligns it with Barnard’s most recent drama “Ali & Ava” (also a Directors’ Fortnight selection, in 2021) as opposed to the more downbeat “The Selfish Giant” (2013) and “Dark River” (2017). In any case, “I See Buildings” continues the character-driven social-realist agenda that runs through her BAFTA-nominated body of work, beginning with her debut feature “The Arbor” — an experimental documentary whose spirit of innovation Barnard has largely abandoned for more straightforward dramas that give human faces to the various systemic injustices in her homeland. Because of its more ambitious scope and ensemble cast of professional actors, her latest has a fair shot at theatrical play outside the U.K.
Nevertheless, it might have worked better in serialized form. The performances give life to its characters, but the script is laughably heavy-handed in the way it stakes out the themes and rushes through character arcs. One minute, Oli is passing out at lunch from excessive drug use, the next he’s changed by a run-in with the small daughter of one of his clients, and adopts a dog that puts his life back on track. We’re constantly reminded of Conor’s alcohol abuse by the mounting number of empty bottles in his office, and Rian’s short-lived relationship with a Kate Middleton lookalike seems destined to fail from their first dating-app meetup.
Tensions between Rian and Patrick flare when Rian drunkenly mentions a brief fling with Shiv, though the film’s clunky edit, which gives little room for the performances to breathe and play out organically within their contexts, makes these frictions feel stilted and juvenile. Barnard gives bleak scenarios a stirring kind of hopefulness, an effect achieved by the cast’s breezy chemistry, but the film as a whole slumps in weird tonal directions that give its tragedies and resolutions a muted, shrugging quality — all the odder because the intention is so evidently to make us weep and smile.
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