County Lines
Henry Blake (2019)
Born in New Zealand and now based in London, Henry Blake is a youth worker turned film-maker. County Lines, which he wrote as well as directed, is his first feature. (He made a short, with the same title and subject, two years previously.) At the end of the film, Blake puts on the screen the dismaying statistic that up to 10,000 children as young as 11 are now involved across the UK in ‘county lines’ operations, which Wikipedia summarises as ‘trafficking drugs into rural areas and smaller towns, away from major cities’. Blake tells the story of one such youngster, fourteen-year-old Tyler (Conrad Khan).
Tyler lives in London with his single mother Toni (Ashley Madekwe) and younger sister Aliyah (Tabitha Milne-Price). The family is badly off; with Toni working night shifts as an office cleaner, Tyler is responsible for picking up Aliyah from school, preparing their food when they get home, and so on. Excluded from regular school himself, he attends a pupil referral unit (PRU), where he stands out as difficult and disengaged. As two of the staff (Anthony Adjekum and Chizzy Akudolu) explain to Tyler’s angrily defensive mother, the boy spends much of his time either in fights or staring into space. Traffickers see PRUs as fertile territory for recruiting vulnerable youngsters to county lines work but Tyler doesn’t become involved through a simple pick-up. On his way home one afternoon, he calls into a fast-food place and buys chips, which other teenage boys immediately try to relieve him of. A man in his twenties, getting up from the table where he’s been sitting alone, intervenes. The would-be chip muggers scarper.
The young man is Simon (Harris Dickinson), a drugs dealer. It’s an effective touch having him do Tyler a good turn on their first meeting – and having Tyler, grateful as he is for Simon’s chivalry, politely decline the offer of a lift home. Simon is the prime example of Henry Blake’s determination, in setting County Lines in motion, to resist being judgmental towards his characters. Quite why and how Tyler pursues contact with Simon is less persuasively handled. The next time Tyler sees him, Simon is beating up a teenager in an alley near the football pitch where Tyler has just been talking to a boy on the team he used to play with. One day, as Tyler sets out for the PRU, he sees a car parked in the street. He approaches it from behind and initiates conversation with the man in the driver’s seat. Simon doesn’t immediately recognise Tyler; I didn’t understand how Tyler recognised the vehicle.
This time, the boy doesn’t manage to say no to a lift. As Simon takes a call in the car, Tyler gazes admiringly at his expensive wristwatch. They go to a café and he listens respectfully as Simon, describing himself as an ‘entrepreneur’, stresses the importance of looking after your family when you’re the man of the house. He also asks about and listens to Tyler – an unaccustomed experience that the boy welcomes. Within a few hours Tyler, courtesy of Simon, has a new pair of trainers and a new way of spending his days. At the end of this one, he’s sufficiently distracted to forget to collect Aliyah from school.
While Blake doesn’t baldly censure the people in his story, he makes clear the consequences of their actions. One night, Toni brings home a man she’s been out with. In the kids’ bedroom, Tyler can’t avoid hearing drunken laughter, then the pair having sex. Next day, Toni struggles into work the worse for wear, falls asleep and gets fired – that reinforces Tyler’s determination, inspired by what Simon said, to provide for his womenfolk. This is a good way of tautening the plot but Blake over-stresses it. He makes Toni’s fecklessness too much responsible for Tyler’s move into county lines – an emphasis which overshadows the fact that his situation and behaviour meant he was already ripe for the picking.
The seductive surface of Simon’s lifestyle is quickly extinguished by the grim reality of the world Tyler enters. As a mule, he has money in his pocket and narcotics secreted where the sun don’t shine. Regularly absent from the PRU, he becomes a commuter. He takes a train to and from Canvey Island, where his main contacts are short-fused Sadiq (Marcus Rutherford), one of Simon’s dealers, and the heroin-addicted Izzy (Johanna Stanton) – both, in their different ways, terrifying. With the help of Sverre Sørdal’s supple cinematography, Blake occasionally interrupts the prevailing perilous squalor of his narrative. At the end of a day’s work, Tyler sits watching the sun set over the Thames estuary. Izzy, despite the state she’s in, gives him a lift to the railway station. After Tyler gets out of the car, a teenage girl gets in: as Izzy drives off, Blake concentrates on the innocent face of her new passenger. There’s a brief return to the spot near the football pitch where Tyler once played. The pitch is in the background of the shot but a million miles away now. The tonal difference and the rarity of moments like these make them doubly affecting.
The film begins with a shot of Tyler seated at a table, half-listening to the voice of an unseen woman, who calmly tells him to stop looking at his phone, asks if he knows the term ‘acceptable loss’ and, when the answer is no, gives several examples of what it can mean. The woman concludes by telling Tyler that, in the business he’s now mired in, he is an acceptable loss. After describing, as a single, extended flashback, his circumstances and initiation into county lines work, Blake reprises the opening scene, this time with Tyler’s interviewer visible. She is Bex (Carlyss Peer), his recently appointed case worker at the PRU. Reiterating her warning about acceptable loss is a basic way of underlining its crucial importance in the story but Bex’s words have a lot more emotional meaning for the viewer this second time around.
As the dire complications of his work accumulate, things go from bad to worse for Tyler, culminating in a savage attack. Acid is thrown in his face; he’s then subjected to a protracted beating up – there’s a lot of putting the boot in that’s difficult to watch. At the same time, Simon – via one of his numerous sidekicks – turns up at Toni’s flat late at night demanding money with menaces. What happens subsequently in County Lines left me grateful yet sceptical. It’s a relief that Tyler gets out of his ordeal alive and turns the corner but the new beginning is so overdrawn that it feels like wishful thinking. I couldn’t see how his mother, by now deeply traumatised, managed to turn her life round as decisively as Toni seems to do. She manages to borrow the two grand demanded of her and pays Simon off. She also acquires, instantly and inexplicably, the means to cope with loan repayments, buy new clothes, and start serving healthy home-cooked meals for the family.
Conrad Khan has acted on screen before but this is his first lead role and Henry Blake directs him admirably. Khan’s face moves easily between innocence and truculence but has a persistent wariness. This disappears only when, back home after the attack and a stay in hospital, Tyler breaks down and cries in his mother’s arms – a poignant reminder of how young he really is. (The scene’s effectiveness is weakened somewhat by Blake’s forgetting about the meal that Toni has just brought to Tyler in bed: the tray of things has somehow disappeared when he uses both hands to clutch her.) Kevin Maher complains in the Times that the film is ‘punctuated by awkward dramatic leaps – such as Tyler’s transformation from angel to devil and back again’. Watching the former transformation, when Tyler loses it and knocks his mother to the kitchen floor, I too was unconvinced by Conrad Khan’s switch into yelling aggression. On reflection, I found it more plausible – an expression of the macho imperative that propels Tyler but which he has to strain to realise. Even if that’s a fanciful interpretation of what’s going on, the sequence does get across, upsettingly, that, in the context of domestic abuse, an adolescent male is plenty old enough to harm and intimidate an adult woman. When the film was shot Khan was in his late teens and Ashley Madekwe in her mid-thirties but she, like him, seems younger – though Toni looks thoroughly (and credibly) worn out, too.
Harris Dickinson’s work in Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats (2017) left little doubt that he was talented though he didn’t seem to me physically or temperamentally right for his role. As Simon, he’s excellent, blending smooth talk and menace expertly, never overdoing either. This time, Dickinson looks the part – Simon’s good features and neat appearance are subtly but definitely undermined by the grotty pallor of his complexion. This is a man proud of his material success and determined, at all times and in various ways, to remind people who’s boss. In one sequence, we see him in a restaurant with his partner and their little daughter. Tyler, who makes the mistake of turning up there to interrupt pleasure with business, is brusquely ejected by Simon – a moment that resonates strongly with their first meeting in an eatery, when he got rid of the boys pestering Tyler. The drugs networks whose workings Henry Blake describes naturally tend to operate across police and local authority boundaries. Simon, who makes a good living from county lines, is very clear in demarcating his professional and private worlds.
6 January 2021
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