A businessman puts his credit cards and briefcase in the trunk of his car, gets wildly drunk and wakes up to find a girl and nothing else.
A Glasgow-born man returns to his hometown after moving to London, where he learned how to make money by selling real estate. He put his knowledge to good use by selling for £500,000 land that he owned to a company planning to construct the tallest office block in Europe. Intending to visit a casino later that day, he puts the cheque he received in payment and all his credit cards in the boot of his Porsche, which he unwisely leaves parked on a street where restrictions apply, failing to notice the parking ticket left on its windscreen. He then spends his evening at the casino where he drinks quite a lot and meets a woman with whom he goes home, where he drinks even more and eventually falls asleep on her couch and is rudely ejected by her the following morning. Still overcome by drink, he falls victim to a couple of muggers who steal what little he has left and even take his coat. He returns to the street where he parked his Porsche and finds it gone, eventually learning that it has been taken to the pound, closed for three days over the weekend and a Monday bank holiday and that he will have to pay around a fine of £145 before he can collect his car on Tuesday. Fortunately, two young homeless girls attempt to help him but get scant thanks, as he finds it very hard to accept that he is now homeless and penniless like them but without their experience of how to cope with such a way of life, as they take him to a soup kitchen and a hostel for the homeless. His association with them brings him to the notice of an evil, psychotic plain-clothes police officer who hates and loathes the homeless and the destitute for reasons that are never made clear.
Most aptly described as a modern Dickensian tale, this imaginative and unusual drama is played out on the streets of Glasgow, which, as in the long-running Scottish police series Taggart, is also a key character is this drama, which contains a number of parallel stories as we follow the lives and fate of various individuals. Written by the director, it seems based it on his own knowledge of this city, from the indifference of the city council to the plight of the poor and the homeless, to the existence of widespread police brutality and corruption, arising from the bribes extorted from the local drug dealers.
Excellent performances by the capable cast make for a very plausible and absorbing story as our hapless hero finds his way in an unfamiliar world and feels a sense of solidarity with its inhabitants, with whom he begins to identify, becoming a more likeable human being in the course of the four days he spends among the homeless. Indeed, homelessness is also a major theme of this well-crafted drama, which has yet to be seen by a much wider audience.
