A debt of gratitude is owed the Samuel Goldwyn Company for their American release of That Sinking Feeling, the first feature of Bill Forsyth, the Scottish writer-director who has captivated audiences in the United States and Europe with his films Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero. That Sinking Feeling will only enhance both his commercial and critical stature; it confirms the notion that Forsyth is among the most original and talented filmmakers of recent years.
An extremely funny film, That Sinking Feeling is also an indispensable contribution to that much-maligned and perhaps most difficult of genres, the caper film. A group of unemployed Glasgow youths, bored and broke, decide to steal a load of stainless steel sinks from a plumber’s warehouse. The robbers’ simplicity naturally results in a plan of near-surreal complexity, involving everything from female impersonation to suspended animation.
Shot in 16 mm on a shoestring budget, the film is nevertheless rich with the unique qualities seen in Forsyth’s subsequent work: excellent ensemble acting, here by a teenage cast that he largely reprised for Gregory’s Girl; the natural treatment of eccentric behavior, which never coarsens into condescension or ridicule; an ear for wonderfully pixilated dialogue (“There’s got to be more to life than committing suicide,” insists the gang’s mastermind); the balancing of naivete with sophistication, which for Forsyth is the constant juggling act of not just adolescents but adults as well. He has combined all this with the genre’s requisite doses of suspense and surprises. As in Local Hero, there’s also an implicit social criticism, and it’s dark with an undercurrent of fear – Forsyth is keenly sensitive to the potential for disaster in our struggle to breathe life into our dreams.
This reviewer has often envied filmgoers of the early 1940s for the excitement they must have felt with the premieres of the first films by Preston Sturges. Well, there’s no longer any need for jealousy: We have Bill Forsyth.
(This review first appeared in The Film Journal, March 1984.)
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For more on Bill Forsyth, see:
Film Review: Comfort and Joy
NICOLE V. GAGNÉ 