Made in Britain (1982)
Tim Roth plays Trevor, a 16 year old Neo-Nazi skinhead who has just put a brick through his local Pakistani corner shop window and is too young to be sent to jail. He winds up in a kind of residential evaluation centre - basically a maisonette-style accommodation block - where he'll be assessed by social workers and other professionals before deciding what happens next. Angry at society or his parents or just authority (we're never told what exactly), Trevor continues to be a social pariah. Stealing cars, sniffing glue, throwing bricks through jobcentre windows, Trevor is never not busy being a cnut.
Attempts at scaring him straight don't work. The carrot fares no better as, after treating him to an evening driving around in stock cars, Trevor repays his case worker by stealing his office keys and then pissing all over the filing cabinet containing all the juvenile delinquents' personal files. Despite being a racist little shit, Trevor manages to get a young black lad to tag along, encouraging him to sniff glue, steal cars, brick windows, hurl racist abuse and shit in filing cabinets. He is rewarded by Trevor smashing the car they stole together into some police vehicles right outside the station and being left to take the blame.
The whole film is bleak, the anger is palpable, and Roth is fantastic in his screen debut. It has echoes of Scum, in that angry young men, whose past catches up with them, are caught in a cycle of violence and offending that is difficult to get out of. Where it differs from Scum, is that the authority figures in Made in Britain aren't brutal, sadistic jailers. No, they're much softer and they appear to genuinely want Trevor to turn away from the dark side before it's too late. Only problem is, Trevor doesn't want to.
8/10
It's like if Bourdieu was at the cinema