Shane Meadows (2009)

Shane Meadows, who shot this film in five days, shows everyone else what it’s possible to do with a mockumentary.   Le Donk is a rock roadie and Scor-zay-zee, a young rap artist, is his latest discovery.  Le Donk, who’s been around without getting anywhere, is looking to change the habits of a lifetime by succeeding – in getting Scor-zay-zee his big break at an Arctic Monkeys concert in Manchester.  (The action moves there, over the course of the picture, from Meadows’s usual territory in the East Midlands.)  Le Donk, played by Paddy Considine, is a fictional character – he first appeared in shorts made by Meadows about ten years ago.  Scor-zay-zee, aka Dean Palinczuk, is a real person, an up-and-coming (white) rapper in Nottingham.  If you didn’t recognise Considine and Olivia Colman (as Le Donk’s ex-partner Olivia) you’d never guess who was playing a character and who himself/herself.  If you do recognise them, you realise how good they are, which makes this brilliant film even better.

The fusion of real and pretend is so rich:  Meadows and Considine get across, for example, Le Donk’s feelings both for the rituals of roadie life and of feeling excluded from it (a particular occupational hazard for a roadie who can put backs up like this one).  There are minor pleasures in spoof details, like the ludicrously precise timings to give us our bearings (the first sequence is introduced as ‘Thursday 9:48 am’).   But physically putting himself in the picture – we see him filming and arguing the toss with Le Donk– enables Meadows to go beyond simple parody and to pick up on what you always suspect are the fraudulent qualities of fly-on-the-wall documentaries that don’t acknowledge the presence of the fly.  When Le Donk first goes back to see Olivia, heavily pregnant with their child but now living happily with a new partner, things turn unpleasant.   Le Donk suggests (to Meadows) that he ‘re-make’ a cup of tea and that Olivia and he then have another crack at the conversation that follows this act of goodwill.

The credits describe the piece as ‘devised’ rather than written by Meadows and Considine.  The freshness of the dialogue certainly makes it sound improvised but the film is very cleverly constructed.  Le Donk’s appetite for ingratiating self-promotion is instinctive.  He’s also canny enough to realise how that instinct can converge with making things happen that will show him in a better light and liven up the documentary being made about him.  Late on the night before the Arctic Monkeys gig at which Scor-zay-zee has been given a short opening spot, Le Donk gets a call on his mobile that Olivia has gone into labour.  It seems like bad timing but he soon works things out.  He confesses to being a selfish, untalented bastard and tells Scor-zay-zee to go ahead without him.  Le Donk speeds down the motorway with the film crew in the back of his camper to see Olivia and their newborn (played by Olivia Colman’s real-life baby).  He mentions the gig to her – he’d like to be there but he knows his duty as an ex and father.  She’s more than happy (as he expected) to give him his marching orders so that he’s able to get back to Manchester for the big day.   He’s done the right thing and got what he wanted.  So too has the Shane-Meadows-within-the-film (and the real Shane Meadows, for that matter).

Paddy Considine, who created Le Donk originally, is really wonderful.  Completely engaged with the character, he’s also beautifully candid about what an egocentric, mouthy blowhard Le Donk is – and clear too that Le Donk sees himself as much more sinned against than sinning.  Considine makes the selfishness charismatic: at the start, Meadows tells Le Donk he wants to make a film about him because he’s an interesting person and, for all his faults, he is interesting.  Considine also shows you why most women can’t stand Le Donk but how the odd one finds him charming.   Although Le Donk boasts that his protégé has already lost several stone under his tutelage, Dean Palinczuk is obese going on spherical.   Early on, he also suggests someone with learning difficulties and, since Le Donk doesn’t let him get a word in edgeways, it takes some time to see him differently.   Once Scor-zay-zee starts rapping, it’s great that he’s so good.   Olivia Colman’s sweet-natured warmth is perfect – and not just because it’s right for a new mother.  Olivia’s maternal capacity goes some way to making you believe how she got hooked up in the first place with the infantile chauvinist Le Donk – whom she addresses a couple of times by his real name, Nicholas.  (Like an unglamorous Pierrot le fou, he tells her not to call him that.)  Colman effortlessly combines naturalism and wit – so do Seamus O’Neill, as Le Donk’s nervously unkempt lodger, and Richard Graham (Meadows’s editor on Somers Town), as Olivia’s new partner.

I laughed more during the 70 minutes of this film than in all the new pictures I’ve seen over the last year put together – and the funny moments are always enhanced by being so thoroughly rooted in truthfulness.  A couple of examples:  the sequence in which Scor-zay-zee explains his (real-life) conversion to Islam and starts chanting and Le Donk, bored by what he’s hearing and annoyed that the camera’s not on him, suggests to Meadows it’s time to cut; and the brilliant conversation between the pair in the back of the camper, on the eve of their big day.  Man of the world Le Donk recounts, in a tone of reverent self-regard, one of the highlights of his amorous career – an evening at a Berni Inn that led to a night of passion.  Scor-zay-zee – presumably as part of a beauty treatment to ensure he looks his best for tomorrow – wears, instead of the baseball cap that’s rarely left his head until now, a towel-turban.  Resembling a lobotomised fortune-teller, he makes exquisitely minimal responses until the moment when he strings enough words together to ask a reasonable but crude question and inadvertently, and to Le Donk’s intense annoyance, breaks the romantic spell.

When the Arctic Monkeys – as themselves – agree to give Scor-zay-zee his spot in the show, Le Donk is stunned.  A large part of it is envy but there’s an element of simple incredulity too – the limelight is a place Le Donk has never been before.  He’s therefore doubly determined not to miss out on the moment.  When the pair performs to the huge open-air audience for the Monkeys (Le Donk calls them the Arctical Monkeys), Considine stays in character – but your awareness that it’s the actor, as well as Le Donk, who’s excited and having the time of his life on stage makes it all the more elating to watch.  He and Dean Palinczuk are a great double act and the choice of names in Le Donk’s accompaniment to Scor-zay-zee’s rap is an inspired mixture of the random and the locally poignant:  ‘Calm down, Deirdre Barlow … calm down, Stephen Hawking … calm down, Harold Shipman …’

15 October 2009