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.

A Clockwork Skinhead

Originally posted, May 4, 2007.

 

The “enlightened” skinheads of This Is England. Sitting, left to right: Gadget (Andrew Ellis), Milky (Andrew Shim), Kes (Kieran Hardcastle), Woody (Joe Gilgun), and Pukey (Jack O`Connell); standing, Shaun (Thomas Turgoose).

This Is England
102 minutes
Written and Directed by Shane Meadows
Starring: Thomas Turgoose, Stephen Graham, Jo Hartley, Joe Gilgun, Andrew Shim, Rosamund Hanson, Jack O`Connell, Kieran Hardcastle, Andrew Ellis, Vicky McClure, Sophie Ellerby, Chanel Cresswell, Danielle Watson, George Newton, and Perry Benson

By Robert Rosen

Despite the cross tattooed Charlie Manson-style in the middle of his forehead, for a gentleman who’s just gotten out of prison he seems like a decent enough chap. And he’s quite the orator, too. Combo (for that is his name) is telling an amusing story to his rapt audience at a small gathering of friends—something about a bloke stealing his “puddin’” in the joint, I think, his anecdote liberally sprinkled with fookin’ this and oi that. (His Scouse accent—at least I believe it’s a Scouse accent—is a little difficult to understand, and the occasional subtitle would not be out of place here.) The real problem with this Combo chap, however, is that to feel completely positive about him you have to overlook his rather dramatic entrance. Apparently, he’d instructed his mate, a fellow skinhead, to barge into the party and, pretending to be a neighbor displeased by the loud music, indicate that he was about to hack everybody to death with the machete he was wielding like a ninja gone bonkers. It’s not until Combo, played with menacing verisimilitude by Stephen Graham, waltzes in and announces that oi, it’s just a bleedin’ joke, lads, that we realize this party is not about to devolve into a total helter-skelter bloodbath. 

What we have here is not the bucolic Britain on display in the “English Garden” calendar that hangs on my kitchen wall, its pages a seductive riot of “Red Georgette” tulips and blue forget-me-nots set against a background of green in all its glorious shades. It is, rather, the Britain of Shane Meadows’ stunning and brutal film This Is England, which is so different from the one I see every morning in my calendar, it may as well exist on a different planet.

Let’s call the planet “July 1983,” which is the date flashed on the screen following a rousing opening montage—set to the music of Toots and the Maytals—of every iconic image that was England at the time. And though the credits later say that the film was shot in Nottingham and Grimsby, which are about 50 miles apart, the setting is a generic East Midlands city gone to seed—a fictional town, based on Meadows’ experiences growing up in the area. You’ve got your blocks of council flats, some inhabited, some abandoned ruins; you’ve got your vacant lots, your bleakly unappealing beach, your “Maggie-is-a-twat”-style anti-Thatcher graffiti scrawled on various bits of concrete, and your young people dressed like Boy George and Cyndi Lauper, listening to the songs that pour from the radios, like “Come On Eileen” and “Tainted Love.”

Oh yeah, then there’s the kid, the star of the show. Shaun (Thomas Turgoose, making his acting debut) is 12 years old, lives with his mother, Cynthia (Jo Hartley), and he’s got issues. Primarily, he’s being picked on at school, cruelly taunted by the older kids about his father, who was killed in the Falklands war the previous year. Shaun will, without hesitation, go berserk on anybody who insults his dad—and he doesn’t give a flyin’ fook how big they are. His violent outbursts, however, tend to land him in the headmaster’s office, and in one memorable scene he coolly waits his turn for corporal punishment while listening to the screams of the kid he was fighting with as the headmaster beats him with a cane. Shaun, in short, is fearless.

The characters’ emotional complexity, as portrayed by a stellar ensemble of mostly unknown actors, is what makes this film extraordinary, one of the best to come out of England in a long time. The plot itself is simple—it revolves around Shaun’s relationship with two local cliques. First, he falls in with some stylish, semi-enlightened skinheads, apparently descendants of the Mods, who are led by Woody (Joe Gilgun), an appealing and articulate young man who takes pity on Shaun and invites him to hang out with his gang. They transform him into a miniature version of themselves, teaching him how to dress, buying him new clothes, and shaving his head, which freaks out his mother. But Cynthia understands that Shaun needs a father figure, and all she asks of Woody and the gang is that if Shaun is going to hang out with them, then they must take responsibility for him, and to please ask her permission before they shave his head again.

There’s genuine affection between Shaun and the skinheads; they even invite him to their parties. One of them, the Lauper-esque Smell (Rosamund Hanson), who’s about 19 and wears braces, takes a fancy to Shaun, and they become, essentially, an item.

“You might look like a baby, but you kiss like you’re 40 years old,” Smell tells him, later asking, “Why don’t you want to suck my tits? Don’t you like me?” Shaun says that he likes her just fine, but he hasn’t had a lot of tit-sucking experience and is a little nervous about it. Though essential to understanding the characters, this is a perfect example of the type of “taboo” material that’s so rarely seen in American films, and one of the reasons that This Is England has such an exotic feel to it.

It’s after Woody’s old mate Combo returns from prison, and begins to dominate the picture with sheer force of personality, that Shaun drifts over to the neo-Nazi skinheads. The crucial moment comes when Combo—furious with the Pakistanis and West Indians who he says are taking over England—delivers an eloquently fascist speech, which he begins by asking the one black man in the group, Milky (Andrew Shim) if he’s English or Jamaican. The moment is ominous, Combo’s propensity for violence always lurking just beneath the surface.

“I’m English,” Milky says after some hesitation.

“Good man,” says Combo, switching to a critique of the government’s stupidity in waging the Falklands war—at which point Shaun physically attacks him. This provokes Combo to declare that Shaun’s the only one in the group with any guts, and that he sees himself in Shaun at the same age.

Combo becomes Shaun’s new father figure, and along with the gang of neo-Nazis, they rob and trash Pakistani-owned liquor stores, harass Muslim kids playing soccer, and go to National Front political meetings—until it all culminates in an inevitable bit of completely insane Clockwork Orange-like ultra-violence.

It’s shocking, it’s horrible, it’s bloody, and it reminds you that, even though July 1983 was a long time ago, it’s still a lot closer than you might want to believe.