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| Director Shane Meadows |
SOMERS TOWN A- Great Britain (75 mi) 2008 d: Shane Meadows
A miniature masterpiece on loneliness and the awkwardness of adolescence, a comedy of errors that is almost too short, because as soon as you gear up to the quirky rhythm and emotional pulse of the film, it’s over. So this film is really just a blink of the eye, a time capsule, a brief moment in time, with one of the best endings since Peter Hedges’ PIECES OF APRIL (2003). Shot by Natasha Braier in black and white, the film is shot almost exclusively in the Somers Town area of northern London, an area of wide cultural diversity that features a large immigrant population and plenty of noticeable construction, including the still under construction St. Pancras station, an immense railway station directly across from a giant apartment complex that resembles a housing project, especially the giant signs warning children that playing is not allowed. Of interest, we’re privy to a father and son breakfast conversation spoken exclusively in Polish, where they read “the personals” from the newspaper in an attempt to learn English. The father, Mariusz (Ireneusz Czop), is one of the construction workers building the railway station while his shy young teenage son Marek (Piotr Jagiello) stays home and wanders the neighborhood all day taking photographs. As it turns out, the father works all day and goes out drinking with friends all night, so the son barely gets a chance to see his father except over breakfast. Adding to the authenticity, these are in real life a father and son, where the son had no previous experience, while the father previously worked in Polish television. It’s apparent the son can barely speak English, so rather than be diminished to an interesting side diversion or an amusing character sketch, it takes a while to discover this family unit is one of the centerpieces of the film. Another is the introduction of a holdover actor from the director’s last film, Tomo (Thomas Turgoose), who played a somewhat autobiographical child skinhead in THIS IS ENGLAND (2006). Tomo inexplicably arrives on a train (from the Midlands, in this director’s first venture outside his home turf) and is another aggressive young teenager even more lost and alone than Marek, as he’s soon sleeping on the streets just blocks from the station, penniless, battered and bruised, with only the clothes on his back and no place to go. Despite their differences, apparently having absolutely nothing in common except a refusal to remain alone, they improbably become fast friends, where a street kid is so desperate for friendship that he’ll even associate with a foreigner, someone he’d likely reject out of hand in the neighborhood where he grew up.
Tomo is intrigued by Marek’s gorgeous photographs of a French girl, Maria (Elisa Lasowski), who played one of the prostitutes in Cronenberg’s EASTERN PROMISES (2007), who works here as a waitress in a local café and is unusual in the display of affection she shows to each boy, SOMERS TOWN - Clip - Directed by Shane Meadows YouTube (2:35). They, of course, are beside themselves with rapturous sexual delight, which she seems to get a big kick out of. She is obviously the “it” girl for them, expressed in an outrageous scene where they both wheel her home after work in an abandoned wheelchair, jubilantly running and smiling the whole way. She lives in another one of these faceless high rise building complexes and disappears overnight, apparently back to France, leaving the boys in a morbid state of mind which turns into a drunken funk in a scene right out of Harmony Korine, dreaming of the day when they can see her again. What’s truly intriguing here is that we enter in the middle of the story, as we’re never told any beginning or end, so we have no idea what the circumstances are that these characters are coming from. After spending some time with them, we can only surmise who they are and where they’re heading. They’re a couple of knuckleheads who grow more brazenly peculiar in each other’s company, expressed by Tomo’s clothes and exacerbated by a local guy Graham (Perry Benson, another Meadows regular), outrageously peculiar in his own right, a guy who sells black market goods on the side and pays the boys to help out. An entire film could be made exploring the seedy side of this guy’s life, but here he’s understatedly comforting, as he’s the closest thing to a friend either one of them have. Much of the film resembles the mood swings of teenage boys, realistically sullen and glum or hysterically offbeat, shown through sequential vignettes that collectively become the film.
Easily the most poignant scene is a father and son conversation, again over breakfast, following the boys’ drunken rampage, where it’s obvious something is not right, as Marek is beside himself for companionship, apparently abandoned by his mother and left to fend for himself by his father, and now abandoned again by the girl of his dreams. What options does he have? He pleads for his family to get back together again, and this time his father listens. The answer may not be what he’d like to hear, but it couldn’t be more heartfelt and authentic. Your heart just tugs for this kid, who’s quiet and polite and dreamy-eyed, and all he has in the world is this dysfunctional street hustler in Tomo, who himself is a liberated bundle of misassembled nerve endings, as he’s a rebellious, occasionally hilarious kid that can be a joy to be around simply because he can’t keep still, so he’s dumbfoundingly unique, but eventually when you need a little quiet time he becomes a giant pain in the butt—but he means no harm. He’s just a numbskull. The way their friendship plays out is close to dream-like, reminiscent of the ice-skating sequences in Korine’s JULIEN DONKEY-BOY (1999), where the brutal mindset of reality is set aside for the trance-like beauty from one’s imagination, where at least for a moment, the world couldn’t possibly be a more perfect place. The director floods the screen with hyper-saturated grainy colors from blown up video, creating a luminous palette of somewhat ambiguous design, perhaps presenting the world the way it could and should be seen, where happiness saturates our every waking thought. The original music by Gavin Clarke resembles indie guitar music, quiet, never interfering, occasionally poetic, always a constant reminder of a hushed, tender side of this zany story even as it occasionally spins out of control.
Somers Town 2008 Full YouTube (1:07:57)
