The weekend as a country
Friday does not begin so much as land, and Cardiff rearranges itself around five friends who have already decided the week was a mistake. Justin Kerrigan’s Human Traffic, released in 1999, spends one weekend with Jip, Lulu, Koop, Nina and Moff, played by John Simm, Lorraine Pilkington, Shaun Parkes, Nicola Reynolds and Danny Dyer. They work jobs they despise, talk faster than they think, and treat the club as a border crossing. The film refuses the lecture. It is interested in the vibe, the venues, the Monday that is already waiting in the hallway.
Kerrigan, barely out of his teens when he wrote it, films his own city without turning it into a postcard of vice. The pubs, the queue, the toilets, the walk home on St Mary Street: these are locations, not metaphors pasted on. What the picture understands, and what sterner films about the same years often miss, is that the weekend was a form of mutual aid as much as a chemical. People looked after each other on dancefloors because the rest of the calendar would not. The jokes are filthy and local. The fear of the comedown is filmed with the same care as the peak, which is how you know the director was paying attention.
The soundtrack is the other map. London Records put out a double album, the second disc mixed by Pete Tong, and it still plays like a late-nineties radio that trusted dancers. Fatboy Slim’s Build It Up, Tear It Down, Orbital’s Belfast, Underworld’s Kittens, Energy 52’s Café del Mar, Carl Cox, Armand Van Helden, Dillinja’s Never Believe, Death in Vegas, Primal Scream’s Come Together. House, techno, drum and bass and big beat share a night without being asked to represent a thesis. Belfast, especially, is the comedown’s patron saint: a loop that feels like morning light through a cheap curtain.
A writer’s film if there ever was one.
(Leonard Maltin)
Critics were split, which suits a film that does not ask to be approved. Leonard Maltin called it a writer’s film, and the line is fair. Kerrigan’s voiceover is a young man’s essay, sometimes too pleased with itself, often exact about shame, sex, work and the small politics of a group of mates. The picture picked up festival prizes and a BAFTA nomination without becoming a manual. It is a cult film in the useful sense: a room of people who recognize the carpet, the dealer, the stupid courage, and do not need the movie to condemn them in order to feel seen.
Rave cinema usually arrives late, after the warehouses have been branded. Human Traffic got there while the weekend still felt like a country with its own anthem and its own border guards. Techno and house, on this site and in this film, are not background for a montage of pills. They are the architecture of friendship for forty-eight hours. When the track ends, Cardiff is only Cardiff again. The film’s kindness is that it does not pretend otherwise, and does not sneer at the hours when it was something else.
