Young Soul Rebels

The only feature by Julien, who immediately displays political ambitions: a daring attempt to reconcile skinhead culture and black culture through a love story between two young men.

Young Soul Rebels is Isaac Julien’s only foray into full-length fiction film so far. Set in the London of 1977, the film tells the story of Mo and Chris, DJs on a pirate radio station. When a gay man is murdered in a London park, Chris is arrested for the crime. Julien imagines the epochal year of 1977, when Pink Rock exploded into public consciousness and Queen Elizabeth celebrated her Silver Jubilee, in terms of its hybrid qualities. Most intriguing is the film’s examination of the popular cultural upheavals of ‘77 from the perspective of Black Soul culture rather than from the predominantly white, working-class Punk rock perspective. It’s an approach that’s partly justified by the time itself, given the centrality of race riots to the period, the overlap between punk and reggae and the solidarity between anti-fascist campaigners and musicians. Young Soul Rebels might now be seen as the missing link between the impressionist, avant-garde fury of Derke Jarman’s films Jubilee and The Last of England and Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi’s chronicling of metropolitan micro-communities in My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. But the film is equally a heady and stylish evocation of, as well as a lament for the utopian possibilities contained in the moment, well expressed in the film’s scrupulous choice of period music, including X-Ray Spex, Parliament and Junior Murvin. —Rotterdam Film Festival