For a while, there was a feeling that comedy was becoming the dominant form of Scottish cinema - starting with the genial humour of Bill Forsyth in the early 1980s, continuing in the 1990s with the darker laughter of the team that made Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, and accompanied along the way by the cheerful Caledonian presence of Billy Connolly.
Then came Lynne Ramsey with Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar, depicting the moral and physical squalor of Scottish working-class life. Now, following The Last Great Wilderness, the curious thriller with which he made his directorial debut, David Mackenzie has adapted Young Adam, the bleak novel that Scottish beat author Alexander Trocchi wrote in 1954.
The film is a kind of psychological thriller set in and around Glasgow in the early 1950s, a time of high employment and low wages. From the opening shots that give the landscape a cold, blue-tinged look and the plaintive David Byrne music that accompanies them, Young Adam catches the sad, desperate feeling of the times.
It begins with the body of a young woman floating in the murky waters of the Clyde and fished out by two bargees, Les (Peter Mullan) and Joe (Ewan McGregor). Les is middle-aged, married to the resentful Ella and living with their seven-year-old son on a barge she owns called Atlantic Eve. Joe - handsome, taciturn, in his late 20s - lives with them, assisting Les in loading and unloading the cargoes they carry along the canals.
Theirs is an unromantic life of hard work and tedium, relieved by bouts of drinking. The dissatisfied Ella becomes Joe's passionate lover. In fact, without over-exerting himself, he also becomes the lover of another married woman and a widow, though he brings little in the way of affection or tenderness to his couplings. It almost seems that the women are punishing themselves for their carnality by having sex under the most miserable and dangerous conditions.
The newspapers record the story of the drowned girl; she's identified as Cathie (Emily Mortimer), a Glasgow office worker, and the police believe she is a murder victim. Headlines announce the arrest of her married boyfriend, a matter that becomes an obsessive subject in the pubs and streets of Clydeside.
Gradually, we learn by observing Joe's reactions and through a series of memories he has that Cathie was his lover and that he feels responsible for her accidental death. His finding her was coincidence certainly, but also destiny.
Trocchi's novel and this film have been compared with Camus' L'étranger and Joe has been seen as some existential antihero, an ambitious would-be writer drifting around, angry and ineffectual after pitching his typewriter into the Clyde in a moment of despair.
The proper comparisons, it seems to me, are with the novels of Emile Zola, the French cinema of the 1930s and American movies of the postwar years. In Young Adam, we find Zola's sense of doom, the way his characters are trapped by fate, family and a malevolent society. The barge setting brings to mind the more lyrical L'Atalante of Jean Vigo and there are close resemblances to Renoir's 1938 version of Zola's La Bête humaine and Fritz Lang's Hollywood adaptation of the same novel, Human Desire.
Young Adam is a cleverly constructed film that holds the attention throughout its economical 95 minutes. The naturalistic acting has considerable power, with Tilda Swinton giving a characteristically un-self-regarding performance and Ewan McGregor steering clear of easy charm. But it is a depressing film exuding hopelessness and inviting us to pity the characters rather than share in their tragic condition.