Special People

By Michael Shamash

The lives of young disabled people are a subject that is rarely depicted. So when a film comes along that tries to explore this topic, your hopes are raised.

Special People, directed by Justin Edgar is the story of a well-intentioned but pretentious filmmaker, Dominic Coleman, who wants to make a film looking at young disabled people.

He chooses a group of disabled people at their school and takes them out filming in the country but puts more effort into interpreting their lives, not showing its reality.

That’s a promising idea for a film, showing how disability is treated by non-disabled people. Unfortunately Special People does not live up to its promise. For example, the students are all wheelchair users, which reinforces the conventional image of disabled people. They are also all conventionally attractive, not challenging narrow stereotypes about body image.

The acting is sub-Grange Hill, with young people always being sullen and having an attitude. Edgar, the director, is so crass that you wonder if he has actually been in the company of disabled people. His good intentions are meant to be ironic but there is a big leap between irony and idiocy.

The film has a poverty of imagination and ambition in other ways too. The young people are types, not people: the over-protected girl, the pretty-but-intense girl, the geeky boy and the troubled teen whom we find is not actually disabled but only acting disabled so he can get the love he’d never had before. This is filming by cliché. The dénouement is particularly feeble.

There is certainly a film to be made depicting the lives of disabled adolescents but this is not it. And if you want to see the film, it is only on for one showing at one cinema in East London. So we have a film that’s not worth seeing being seen by no one. What a result!