Brassed Off

They've both been born of unemployment in Britain and are very earthy, funny and honest films.

Britain has been giving us great films in recent years. The Full Monty, Secrets And Lies, Trainspotting, Life Is Sweet, Land And Freedom, The Commitments, High Hopes, Career Girls and Blue Juice isn't a bad lot.

Brassed Off is about the members of The Grimwall Colliery Band who have been pouting lips and blowing hard for one hundred years. Unfortunately it looks as though the coal mine is going to close and the band might have to finish.

The band is led by Danny, an ageing miner who is played by that wonderful actor Pete Postlethwaite. Danny loves this brass band, as do all of its members, but how can these men concentrate on music when their livelihood, as well as the lifestyle of their fore fathers is receding around them?

How can they possibly win the London National Brass Band Championship?

Onto the scene appears the very cute Tara Fitzgerald playing Gloria, (soon known as Glorious Tits to her fellow band members). Gloria plays a very mean flugel horn, and immediately wows us all with a superb solo of the middle movement of the Guitar Concerto written by Rodrigez.

Now as far as I can remember, a guitar version of that concerto was the first record I ever bought. I love that piece of music. There I was crying again in the cinema, a tribute to a great piece of music reverently played and Brassed Off and I were off to a very good start.

It wasn't the last time a shed a tear in this film either, a tribute to a damn good film in my book and to a simple, straight forward, old fashioned kind of movie; the kind of film that should be made more often.

It's designed to pull the heart strings and wobble the funny bone and stir the political animal in us, all at the same time, and you probably won't mind being manipulated at all.

The characters are amazingly cute, especially Tara Fitzgerald and Ewan McGregor who plays Andy, one of the band members, and who is the only obvious candidate for Gloria's attentions.

Ewan McGregor is gaining an increasing number of fans, with his performances ranging from the lead in Trainspotting to the painted youth in The Pillow Book.

The political side of the demise of these collieries in England was harsh and devastating to the mining communities. Over 140 of these coal mines closed in the nineteen-eighties and nineties.

Australians these days definitely can understand the uncertainty that is caused by large social disruptions such as these. Brassed Off operates strongly on this level, but mainly by concentrating on the personal tragedies that result from the march of technological change.

I can reveal that Danny does get up and make a speech towards the end of Brassed Off, but only because the content of that oration is as surprising as it is emotive.

That such strength can come from the depths of despair; especially when a community decides to pull together for the common good is a great source of comfort for those who might be facing unemployment.

But above all Brassed Off warms the heart.