Ruby and Frank -- young and Aimless

The Low Down stands out in my mind as a film that seems more real than most movies. It tells the stories about a group of late twenty-something friends in London, centering around Frank (Aidan Gillen), who does not like to be identified by what he does, and his evolving relationship with Ruby. There is nothing not to like about Ruby, played by Kate Ashfield: she has a great short hair cut, a lovely smile, and she is earnest when describing a Norman Mailer novel as excellent. In any other movie, a sweet and satisfying relationship between the two would be the perfect and obvious thing, but life is not so simple.

Join the Discussion Have you seen "The Low Down?" Post in the Forum

Related Resources • More articles • British Film

Elsewhere on the Web • Official Site • 6 Degrees Review • InsideOut

What Frank does do is make props for a television show. He is artistically inclined but not an artist. He has enough money to leave his apartment in a seedy area of London, but he is afraid to be caught in the trappings of adulthood. He meets Ruby at the real estate agency. She'd love a nice place, a better job. Frank's business partners embody his choices: one who has a steady girl and a nice home, with the furniture and polished wood floors that goes with it. The other sleeps around, drives a broken car, and spends too much money on cool sneakers. Frank is solidly in the middle, an aimless cipher.

Frank is complex enough that I had a completely different opinion of him than my company - I thought him unlikable and offensive, whereas my friend saw rhyme and reason behind his actions. The same ambiguity extends to most things that happen. There are scenes here you usually never see in movies, my favorite among them the guy who tries in vain to order a drink at the bar at a crowded club - an experience that has been a central frustration in my life for many years and which I had never seen adequately rendered on the big screen.

The sex scenes here that are neither the romanticized soft-focus affairs you see in Hollywood productions, nor the sordid abusive kind you often find in foreign films, especially of the German persuasion. Instead, they just seem real - skin that isn't always beautiful clumsily revealed in apartments that feature cheap, cracked sinks, and clothes on the floor.

The film has some lengths in which the loose style and deceptively aimless storytelling work against it, but it pulls through and culminates in a satisfying finale and a finely ambiguous ending.

The Low Down - Written and Directed by Jamie Thraves. With Aidan Gillen, Kate Ashfield, Dean Lennox Kelly, Tobias Menzies, Rupert Proctor . UK.
Shooting Gallery Film Series.