Stolen KissesBy John DeSando, "It's Movie Time," "Cinema Classics," and "On the Marquee"
'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm." Bob Dylan
Short, bleak, and brilliant?Kisses is an Irish picaresque of two 11 year-old working class kids, Kylie and Dylan, escaping at Christmas time abusive relatives from each one's home. Their odyssey takes them the streets of inner-city Dublin, where Kylie is abducted by rapists and Dylan discovers his love for her as he fights the devils, who indeed are people, not the mythical "Sack Man" they've feared in their neighborhood horror lore.
The titular motif plays as an ironic reminder that life can give monstrous and beautiful at the same time: kisses that signify the unbridled lust of an uncle or a gift, the only thing one has, between two kids who have yet fully to understand the ambivalence.
One "ting" is certain-- there is some beauty in the outer world: the immigrant dredge-boat driver, who gives them a ride to the city, is playful while he gets them happily to work for him as he introduces them to Dylan's namesake through a song (see above) that speaks of offering shelter from a storm.
Filmmaker Lance Shelby has done the difficult by extracting love from an unforgiving landscape, like Mike Leigh's kitchen sink blokes caught in the suburbs with no one to save them yet finding hope in small gestures, like kisses, that cost little but mean much. Shelby's transition from black and white boondocks to color inner-city is too much of a clich? to be praised, but the black and white is effective as metaphor for the colorless world of the poor burbs.
While the families are over the top also, or at least too unbelievably oppressive and crude, from the children's point of view, they are the devil until the kids meet the real one in the abductor/rapist. Lessons are to be learned even if the classroom is the school of hard knocks. After all, just north of them Irish have been killing Irish for decades.
"There's no devil. Just people." Kylie
John DeSando co-hosts It's Movie Time, Cinema Classics, and On the Marquee for WCBE 90.5. The shows can be heard streaming at http://publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/ppr/index.shtml and on demand at http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/arts.artsmain Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.RR.com