A great film, offering a slice of life in present-day Leeds that most of us would rather not know about. The plot is almost incidental. The film's success lies in the portraits of the two families, one native white, the other second-generation Pakistani and their complex love-hate relationships. Kelly Hollis is superb as the gutsy single mother with three kids by different fathers, coping on her own with the racial antagonisms that have blown up in Leeds since her own childhood.
The flimsy storyline follows the youngest lad as he and his mates prepare for Mischief Night, when children (or at least white children in Yorkshire) are allowed to create havoc by playing tricks on adults. The more subtle interactions are in the Pakistani community, where the older daughter is resisting an arranged marriage, the older son cannot communicate with his Pakistani wife except by meeting her incessant demands for sex, and the local drug dealer is hired to sort out the Jihadi extremists.
The characters are for the most part grotesque, but with enough humour - the dialogue is particularly strong in every sense - to make them both watchable and believable. The acting is splendid, especially by the youngsters, and the visual portraits of the streets and houses of the two communities are vibrant. A bleak but absorbing, funny and eventually heart-warming film.
