大象传媒

British artist Tracey Emin has built her reputation on confrontational and headline-grabbing artworks fearlessly based on her own life. On the strength of this shambolic, hour-long first feature, however, she should stick to tents and unmade beds. Drawing on her experiences growing up in Margate, Top Spot focuses on the sexual awakenings of six teenage girls. But its real subject, as in all of Emin's work, is Tracey herself, making this dispiriting exercise in navel-gazing of little interest to anyone outside the Britart clique.

Sex is never far away from Emin's oeuvre, and so it proves with Top Spot, which takes its name from both a tatty Margate nightclub and a slang term for the place where a penis hits the neck of the womb during intercourse. Indeed, much of the piece consists of talking-heads interviews with the girls as they reveal their formative sexual encounters. One talks of the rapist who "broke her in"; another tries to hide a love-bite she received from an older woman.

Then there's Helen, a lovelorn innocent obsessed by an Egyptian lad she kissed at the funfair, and finally Lizzie, who makes little impact until the very end when she slits her wrists in a bath tub. (It was this scene that made the BBFC grant the film an 18 certificate, much to its director's widely-publicised chagrin.)

"A DRABLY SHOT, UNDERWHELMING CLUNKER"

None of this rings remotely true, with some of the young actresses looking plainly embarrassed by their pretentious dialogue. To make matters worse, the piece unfolds in a shapeless style that considers it a virtue to confuse and wrong-foot the audience. It may pass muster when projected on an art gallery wall, but at the cinema it's a dead loss: a drably shot, underwhelming clunker, produced by a tabloid-baiting self-publicist long past her sell-by date.