Starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton. Rated 18A.

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Oh, those hot-blooded Scots. According to this well-below-the-kitchen-sink view of life in the northern U.K. circa 1949, the fog-shrouded creatures who travel the River Clyde would sooner doff their duds than drink a pint of ale. And what better way to celebrate seeing an old lover than to lie naked under a truck on a rain-spattered gravel road?

The presence of grunge Adonis Joe Taylor (Ewan McGregor) has a lot to do with this nasty behaviour. There's something about the way Joe's eyes probe a woman (just about any woman, really) that suggests she'll get exactly what she needs from him--unless what she needs is an emotional connection. Joe hardly utters a sound when he spies a near-naked corpse floating near the barge upon which he works for the similarly taciturn Les (Peter Mullan). The tender way his hired hand lifts her body from the water raises a few suspicions for Les, even if he's not quite as tuned in to the vibes passing between Joe and his wife, the perpetually bitter Ella (Tilda Swinton). She softens a bit around the couple's small son, Jim (Jack McElhone), but not enough for any but the most predatory male to see where her vulnerabilities lie.

In colour-rich flashbacks that contrast with the main tale's almost sepia-toned scenes, we learn of the relationship between Joe and Cathy (Emily Mortimer, from Lovely & Amazing), a lass who couldn't understand her guy's lack of commitment outside of the bedroom--although his unorthodox use of homemade custard ranks him right up there with Marlon Brando as a culinary innovator.

There's a lot of nudity in director David Mackenzie's adaptation of Alexander Trocchi's beat-era novel of the same, too-contrived title, and the violin-led score, from David Byrne and played by an array of modernistic Scots, underlines the film's mordantly carnal qualities. But the sexuality here is of a cold and squeamish sort--more object lesson than romp in the existential hay.

Mackenzie is effective at sketching slate-grey atmospherics--the images possess a remarkably bleak beauty--but his clumsy, anachronism-laden script makes it clear, despite gamely brave acting all round, that he hasn't thought through the inner lives of these essentially repellent characters. Why, for example, does Joe want to be a writer (yet another movie with a typewriter and scrunched-up pieces of paper) when he
doesn't have anything to say? And how are we supposed to feel when he gets increasingly drawn into the trial of a man accused of killing the woman Joe found in the river? It's Alfie as rewritten by Albert Camus.

By the way, it's interesting (more interesting than the story, I'm afraid) to note that Roger Ebert is the only major critic to have noticed the movie's obvious parallels to L'Atalante, one of the first classics of the sound era. In Jean Vigo's influential film poem, a young couple working a barge out of Paris is frequently distracted by the antics of a crusty first mate and a precocious cabin boy. It can't be a coincidence that the boat in Young Adam is called the Atlantic Eve.