Critics walk out on ?video nasty?
By Dalya Alberge

A BRITISH film about drugs and violence in a seaside town shocked film critics into walking out of its screening at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday.

The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael features a gang-rape scene described by one reviewer as so violent that it made Stanley Kubrick?s A Clockwork Orange look like a ?Britney Spears video?.

Many critics stormed out just before the end of the film, after seeing a scene in which a teenage gang breaks into the home of a TV chef before torturing and raping his wife. The attack is so horrific that she bleeds to death. The scene is ?ultraviolent and nauseating?, Leslie Felperin, of Variety, said.

Allan Hunter, of Screen International, described it as ?video nasty territory . . . a disturbing state-of-the-nation wake-up call?. He said that it may be too much of a challenge for many distributors: ?Most UK distributors have a mountain to climb in trying to persuade British audiences to see indigenous productions and may just consider this too unpalatable.?

The film, starring Danny Dyer and Lesley Manville, is set in an English seaside town against the backdrop of the Iraq war. It follows the story of a shy teenager, Robert Carmichael. Although he is bright, he starts skipping school to take drugs and falls in with bad company.

In one scene, Robert watches the invasion of Iraq on TV while a heavily drugged teenage girl is gang-raped in the next room. That rape takes place offscreen but the second is shown in graphic detail.

Phil Symes, a film publicist, had been due to represent the film at Cannes. He turned down the offer after seeing it: ?We couldn?t defend the film, so we decided it was better we didn?t work on it.?

Thomas Clay, the director of the film, his first, said that he wanted audiences to feel ?shocked and disgusted? by the scene and argued that gang rapes happen regularly in war zones such as Bosnia and Iraq.