Top Spot (2004)

As an artist, Tracey Emin's work have always focused on the autobiographical and her film 'Top Spot' is no different. Apparently based on her own childhood, the film follows a group of girls in Margate, discussing their sex lives and generally displaying a detachment from regular society. Unfortunately, like most srtists, Emin displays a distinct lack of understanding of filmmaking.

The film opens with a series of interviews with each of the schoolgirls giving frank information on their sex lives, openly talking about groping, snogging, being raped and a woman who invites one girl to her house and makes her do strange things. The interviewer seems to be Emin herself, and this is the first instance where we are confused between reality and fiction. The girls are all newcomers, and the film being shot on video also give it a very real, amateurish look, although this isn't necessarily a good thing and it does look rather cheap. The film goes on to follow these girls in a very elliptical narrative, cutting strangely to Luxor in Eygpt where one of the girls has quite obssesively gone to track down her Franch Foreign Legion boyfriend (yes, it really is that random).

Throughout the film there are isolated moments that seem to have little depth beyond camera trickery, and when we do join the narrative the dialogue is weak and poorly acted. The only thing we know for sure is that all of the girls are miserable, and almost certainly not virgins. It seems they all live alienatede and unsatisfied lives, focusing mainly on getting it off with boys. One by one we see them looking depressed, and although I knew at some point one of the girls would kill herself it really could have been any one of them. When she does, it looks poorly unrealistic and no one is upset.

The frequent use of music is always intrusive and the camerawork unimaginative. The overbearing sense of misery in the story and characters has no balance and the attempts at realism end up appearing more ridiculous. The scenes in Egypt are uncomfortably tacked on and the final sequence when Margate is bombed has no relevance at all. The film just isn't as meaningful as it would hope to be. Artists tend to think filmmaking is much easier than it is and even that they are more than capable, when the reality is they have simply mastered the basics.

I'll admit that perhaps this film would work better as an art project in a gallery, and that perhaps then I would view it in a different way and attach new meaning to its contents, but the truth remains that it is poorly made, uncommunicative and, frankly, boring.