'Streetwise' (1984) - Martin Bell.

Inspired by a hard-hitting article in Life magazine, Martin Bell's bleak documentary rigorously maintains our attention on the desperately penurious, risk-laden and altogether hazardous, day-to-day existence of homeless teenagers. With remarkable candour, Bell documents their Promethean struggles to make frugal ends meet 'living' among the squalor and arbitrary violence of downtown 80s Seattle. While 'Streetwise' is never less than absorbing, Martin Bell's laudably raw documentary also frequently makes for distressing, far from genteel viewing. 

 

An uncomfortably weary-looking, alcoholic mother, working as a waitress serves her equally wan, undernourished daughter (Erin) who then casually remarks that Erin grew up all too rapidly on the streets. '14 going on 21!', the mother says dispiritedly, and this almost battle-hardened cynicism Erin manifests could readily be applied to all the disenfranchised, emotionally damaged teenagers in this unfiltered documentary. All too many of these woefully mistreated children had been neglected until finally being rejected wholesale by their families, thereby effectively damning them all to this truly nightmarish, cruelly unsheltered half-life on the pitiless streets of a city apparently oblivious to their awful privations.

One of the more distasteful aspects of this soul-wrenching expose are the nauseating realities of blithely predatory adults all too blithely picking up these underage 13/14-year-old girls and boys. The egregious recollections of the terrible abuse these grossly mistreated children endure is truly heartbreaking to behold. It is certainly not hard to empathize with the terrible plight of these woefully downtrodden teens, especially upsetting is the plaintive sight of the very young and palpably frail looking Erin (Tiny) who blithely recalls the myriad unsavoury realities of her misbegotten 'Dates'. Almost too much to stomach, an innocent, fragile child who by all rights should be warmly cosseted by those who love and care for her is all too regularly caught in the malign, wholly immoral clutches of foul degenerates who so callously do her considerable physical and emotional harm in their debased quest for illicit gratification. It actually proves quite enervating to coldly witness the seemingly limitless depths some debased individuals plummet in order to briefly satiate their profane appetites.

'Streetwise' remains a ferociously powerful polemic that unfortunately has lost none of its bite, or social relevance today. This especially unfiltered expose's continued perspicacity,is, perhaps, no less a disturbing reality that many of the more vividly unfiltered scenes of deprivation in, Martin Bell's darkly compelling documentary. Again, the unassailable fact that so very little has changed, with inner city poverty and homelessness on the increase is forcefully damning of capitalism's more insidiously tenacious and deleterious effects.