Foxy And Marina

Does heroin have the romantic associations it does because only the most interesting stories emerge from it? It's inspired plenty of songs, plenty of books, plenty of films, but perhaps indirectly - for everyone who's gone up to Lexington more dead than alive there are perhaps dozens, hundreds, thousands that haven't quite made it, haven't mustered the right combination of evolutionary fitness and escape velocity to free themselves from the tarry mess. Foxy And Marina is one of those flailing, dragged back into the morass.

Certainly Foxy is, in Glasgow, on heroin, when he should be in Skye, and not. Though this is not the Glaswegian equivalent of Trainspotting's Leith, not pre-reform bookmakers' toilets, not amputation-beckoning sepsis. There's lack - Foxy's short of cash, freshly homeless, glaikit - but there are options. He's got a train ticket home, an expensive orange rectangle of opportunity.

He's also got a stolen birthday cake, a grumpty dealer, and a new friend in Maria - when he's pressured, trying to score on credit, he's pushed by Benito: "Do you have an iPhone 4? ... it's got a spirit-level app [to make things] nice and straight, like things should be between us". The rest of the dialogue doesn't quite hit those heights, always seeming just a little out-of-true, but it's off-set by some lovely framing and focus work, especially in the scenes between the titular characters.

Lorne MacFadyen's Foxy is both a fish out of water and small in a big pond, never quite the ingenue, never quite worldly enough. Pollyanna McIntosh's Marina is far more assured, far more aware, far more damaged. As Benito, Mark Oliver injects a subtle note of menace, not least when things go wrong and Foxy turns to him in a panic.

In Q&A director Zachariah Copping said that in retrospect he'd make the ending more ambiguous, and while it's hard to argue it should be said that the film does leave questions unanswered and does so in a positive way. Marina has a fondness for the piano, and it's intriguing that for all her talk of Mozart it's Beethoven we're hearing. If Foxy And Marina has a single problem it's heroin - too many other comparisons, to too many other works. While it's well-made, well-acted, it's trying to draw from a well too often tapped. That's not to say it should not be applauded for trying - it's indicative of no small measure of talent - it's just that it doesn't have the power one would hope for because it's lost among others in the same vein.