Film
Brassed Off
- Director
- Mark Herman
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 107 mins
A Channel Four-backed Yorkshire pit village miners’ strike comedy-drama, using the local brass band as a microcosm of village life. Local lass-made-good Tara Fitzgerald returns to surreptitiously work for the Coal Board, proving she can play the flugel-horn with the best of them and rekindling her childhood romance with Ewan McGregor. Meanwhile, to band leader Pete Postlethwaite nothing is as important as rehearsing to perfection and winning the national brass band championships, while his militant son Stephen Tomkinson is struggling desperately to prevent his wife moving out as his livelihood collapses around him.
Out of a clutch of strong performances, Tomkinson walks away with the film, sinking deeper and deeper into a no-exit despair of unemployment. Shame, then, that the decidedly small-screen shooting style should prevail throughout.
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