BIFF Review / Angels' Share ****

Director: Ken Loach
Where: Liberty Theatre
Showing: Sunday, April 14 at 9:15pm

Gritty Britflick director Ken Loach appears to be mellowing in his old age.

His latest offering, the Angels’ Share, is a light comedy — but still with a social conscience and a few swipes at right-wing ideology and the social destruction it caused. It’s ironic it gets a showing in the week tributes were paid to former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, as it shows the other side of her legacy — vanished industries, wrecked communities and people without hope adrift on a sea of drugs and alcohol.

The plot centres around a young Glaswegian thug who narrowly escapes a jail term after a vicious drug-induced assault on an innocent man.

The Sheriff goes easy on Robbie (Paul Brannigan) after he hears his girlfriend is due to give birth. He is given 300 hours of community service instead and meets Harry (John Hanshaw), who ends up the unlikely saviour of the soon-to-be dad after he introduces him to the world of the whisky connoisseur.

The film — which won the jury prize at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival — switches between worlds, from the grim east end of Glasgow to its leafy west end and on to Edinburgh, known as the Athens of the North.

Similiarly, Robbie deals with the casual street violence of Glasgow, his girlfriend’s violent father, who wants him out of her life, a local rival who just wants him dead and the middle-class world of whisky tasting. For Robbie finds on a distillery tour in the idyllic Highlands arranged by Harry that he has a nose for whisky and starts to read up on the subject.

It’s while at a whisky-tasting in Edinburgh he finally gets the idea that could pull him out of his grim surroundings, unemployment and help him start a new life with girlfriend Leonie (Siobhan Reilly) and their new-born son. Any more would give away the plot – but it’s a kind of working-class Oceans 11 with a Scottish accent and tracksuits instead of tuxedos.

The film features scenes shot at Glengoyne and Deanston Distilleries, a stone’s throw from my hometown, and I can vouch for the fact nobody’s artificially enhanced the surroundings — it really is that stunning. Bermudians might have a little difficulty with the accents and the Glasgow patois but they’ll surely love to see the underdog triumph, the heart-warming finale and, of course, the Highland scenery.