Bumping the Odds

This English movie from 1997 tells the story of a few women in a Scottish ghetto and their all-day lives with sex, violence, unemployment, hopes, prostitution, drugs and despair. Driven by the need of money for their children and families, they loan some money by some brutal gangsters who start terrorizing and threatening them until the bitter end.

Directed by Rob Rohrer in the real suburbs of Glasgow, this movie speaks a realistic and dirty language that is supported by the intense acting of the beautiful actresses Shirley Henderson ("Harry Potter") and Sharon Small. The whole pacing and acting is nervous, despaired and always on the edge of an explosion... a brilliant contemporary social drama that has its roots in the British kitchen sink dramas of the fifties and sixties with the much more brutal language of the modern English cinema in the wake of "Trainspotting".

When two likely Glasgow lasses fall foul of a ruthless money lender the consequences are shocking.

If you can take the thick Scottish accents, the salty language of the streets and some pretty heavy-duty violence then this is a brilliant drama about people living on the edge of debt and danger with alcoholism, drug-addiction and homelessness never far away.

The hand-held camera and often out of focus photography is dizzying, the plot most involving. The pretty thirty-something women have a motto "Men are for shags, friends are for life" but when the crunch comes nothing is certain.