After the Masterpiece

Originally posted April 28, 2008.

Above: In Shane Meadows’ Somers Town, Tommo (Thomas Turgoose), carrying all his worldly possessions, arrives in St. Pancras Station. Below: Meadows, in New York for the Tribeca Film Festival. In his autobiographical films the director uses Turgoose as a stand-in for his younger self. Meadows photo © Robert Rosen 2011.

Somers Town
70 minutes
Directed by Shane Meadows
Screenplay By Paul Fraser
With Thomas Turgoose, Piotr Jagiello, Elisa Lasowski, Ireneusz Czop, Perry Benson, and Kate Dickie

By Robert Rosen

If I had doled out stars at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, I’d have given Shane Meadows’ violent, funny, autobiographical masterpiece This Is England 4½…maybe 5. I’d never heard of Meadows at the time, and his film took me by surprise. My review, which I called “A Clockwork Skinhead,” remains one of the most frequently accessed pages on this site, with readers generally locating it by Googling some variation on the phrase “Suck my tits.” In the film, that is what 19-year-old Smell (Rosamund Hanson) wants her 12-year-old boyfriend, Shaun (Thomas Turgoose, making his acting debut) to do to her.

Meadows’ 2008 TFF entry, Somers Town, a 70-minute, mostly black-and-white feature—the final few minutes, set in an Oz-like Paris, are in color—grew out of a half-hour short, and appears to be more a case of the director catching his breath than a genuine follow-up. (The true follow-up will be King of the Gypsies, about a bare-knuckles fighter, currently in pre-production.)

Somers Town, however, has much in common with This Is England­—starting with its star, Turgoose, a fearless young actor with a deadpan sense of comic timing who serves as a stand-in for Meadows himself. This time he plays Tommo, a 15-year-old orphan from Nottingham, who falls for Maria (Elisa Lasowski), a much older, very attractive French waitress at a local London café. But unlike This Is England, which peers into the abyss of the social order and rips out its heart, Somers Town, named for the working-class neighborhood near St. Pancras Station, can almost be described as a light romantic comedy-drama.

Almost—because when Tommo arrives in London with a duffel bag containing all his worldly possessions, a gang of local thugs promptly rip him off and kick his head in for good measure. And though this vicious stomping doesn’t approach the ultra-violence of This Is England, it’s still far too ugly a scene for anybody to mistake this film for a light anything.

The meandering plot mostly revolves around Tommo’s friendship and rivalry with Marek, played by another talented, unknown young actor, Piotr Jagiello. A 15-year-old Polish immigrant who lives with his divorced father (Ireneusz Czop) near St. Pancras Station, Marek clandestinely shelters Tommo in his cramped apartment.

Marek, an amateur photographer, is obsessed with taking pictures of his “girlfriend,” Maria. Deeply impressed with the photographs, Tommo first asks Marek if he has any porno shots, and then learns that his new friend and benefactor hasn’t even kissed Maria. Tommo gets it into his head that Maria’s soon going to fall in love with him, and he tells Marek to give him all the shots of his, Tommo’s, girlfriend. (Marek later catches Tommo masturbating with the photos.)

More complications and comedy ensue. Maria says that she loves both boys equally, then leaves for Paris without saying a word. Marek’s father, struggling to earn a living, learn English, and assimilate in a new country, finds his son and Tommo drunk out of their minds, busting up the apartment. Graham (Perry Benson), a middle-aged businessman, puts Tommo and Marek to work doing odd jobs, and in one scene greets the boys at his door wearing an open robe, his enormous belly hanging over a very tight pair of briefs. Perhaps this is why, when Graham later offers Tommo a full-time job and says that he’ll have to do everything he tells him, Tommo replies with deadpan perfection, “You mean have sex with you?”

It’s all very believable, very real, and very well done—authentic British flavor and sound is a Meadows trademark.

Oh yeah, those stars… I almost forgot. As one of Meadows’ characters might say, in a thick, almost indecipherable accent requiring subtitles to understand: Oi, fook all. And as I might say: I ain’t ratin’ this movie with no fuckin’ stars, like some priggish, cane-wielding headmaster. Because the downside of creating a masterpiece is the high expectations it engenders, and to grade Somers Town in such a clichéd way would be an insult to Shane Meadows and his extraordinary troupe of actors. I’m just going to wait for King of the Gypsies, and then I might dole out a few more stars. And you? You’ll just have to see Somers Town and decide for yourself how it stacks up.