Shane Meadows (2008)
In this short (71-minute) film, Shane Meadows avoids making obvious comments about the social and economic forces which have impelled the main characters to coincide in North London, around the time that the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras is being completed. Mariusz is a Polish immigrant construction worker on the site; he has split from his wife and brought their adolescent son Marek with him to England. Tomo, another teenager, has run away to London from an unhappy life in the East Midlands (the usual setting for Meadows’s films). The core of Somers Town is the friendship of the two boys. The director steers clear too of any negative judgments about these or virtually any other characters; he takes the people as he finds them, almost celebrates them. Some of the behaviour is borderline criminal: it’s often funny but Meadows avoids making it cute by keeping you aware that it’s the result of desperation or boredom. This intelligently benign approach – combined with the skill of the actors – makes you so well disposed to the film that it’s unassailably likeable, even if overly reliant on charm and even though the working out of the slender storyline is uninspired. The writer, Paul Fraser, has such a good ear for funny, naturalistic dialogue that he deflects attention from the limitations of his script. (Marek may be a passive character but it’s not believable that he so easily allows Tomo to join in with his crush on a French waitress in a local café. How does Tomo, after he’s been mugged on his first night in London, know where to locate the kindly woman he’s met on the train down from Nottingham?)
As Tomo, Thomas Turgoose holds the screen with his stocky bloody-mindedness and spot-on, effortless comic timing. The physical contrast – and contrast in sensibility – between the two boys is very effective. Piotr Jagiello looks a young man but his voice hasn’t broken yet; this expresses Marek’s uncertainty in a foreign country and places him in a no man’s land between childhood and adulthood in a vivid way. Although he’s comfortable enough with genital talk when he and his father are preparing dinner together, he’s embarrassed by it in Mariusz’s drinking sessions with his Polish co-workers – yet there are moments when Marek seems older than his father. (Thomas Turgoose also sometimes suggests an embryonic old man.) The morning after he has got drunk for the first time, Marek seems to have aged, as he listens to his father apologising for having made a mess of their lives. Ireneusz Czop as Mariusz has a boyish quality which blends easily into showing this more vulnerable side to the hard-working, hard-drinking, easily sociable man he’s seemed to be for most of the film. The film is marvellously cast – with imagination and a real percipience about how the actors can work together. With Elisa Lasowski (as the object of the boys’ desires), Kate Dickie (as the woman Tomo meets on the London train), Perry Benson (as a neighbour with a garageful of dodgy goods), Huggy Leaver (as the café proprietor). In black-and-white, except for the last five minutes, a fantasy sequence (it’s to be hoped) which is lame but which does underline the idea of the locale, or at least St Pancras, offering a point of departure and a sense of possibility. Music and songs by Gavin Clarke.
26 August 2008
