One Cardiff weekend, scored by late-90s dancefloor records
Friday does not so much begin as land. Cardiff rearranges itself around five friends who have already decided the week was a mistake, and the club is the only border they still trust. Justin Kerrigan’s Human Traffic (1999) spends forty-eight hours with Jip, Lulu, Koop, Nina and Moff — John Simm, Lorraine Pilkington, Shaun Parkes, Nicola Reynolds and Danny Dyer — talking faster than they think, working jobs they despise, and treating the dancefloor as mutual aid rather than a moral problem. The film refuses the lecture. It wants the vibe, the venues, and the Monday already waiting in the hallway.
Kerrigan wrote the script barely out of his teens and filmed his own city without turning it into a postcard of vice. Pubs, queues, toilets, the walk home on St Mary Street: 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 care 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 shot with the same attention as the peak, which is how you know the director was in the room for both.
The soundtrack is the other map of the story. London Records released 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. Tracks do not decorate montages of pills; they structure friendship for the length of a set. Belfast, especially, becomes the comedown’s patron saint — a loop that feels like morning light through a cheap curtain, when the club has closed and the city is only Cardiff again.
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’s 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. Festival prizes and a BAFTA nomination arrived without turning the picture into 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. On a site that files techno and house as living genres rather than nostalgia props, the film remains a document of how those records worked in a room: not background for a cautionary tale, but the pulse that held five people together until daylight. When the track ends, Cardiff is only Cardiff. The film’s kindness is that it does not pretend otherwise, and does not sneer at the hours when it was something else. For anyone who still hears Belfast or a Tong mix and remembers a specific sticky floor, this is the weekend preserved without apology.
