UK | 2008 | Directed by Shane Meadows
Logline: An unlikely friendship is forged between a young reckless runaway from the Midlands, a young Polish immigrant living with his poor father, and a pretty French girl who both boys fancy.
Shane Meadows is one of the best directors working in England. He has numerous excellent features to his name, chiefly TwentyfourSeven, A Room for Romeo Brass, Dead Man’s Shoes, and This is England. My favourite, however, is his first release, an hour-long featurette called Small Time, a brilliant comedy, but unfortunately it is still unavailable on DVD (and very rare on VHS). Somers Town is like Small Time, as it runs at just under 70 minutes, but packs enough in.
Originally intended as a short promo piece for the EuroStar international rail-link (they co-funded the project), Paul Fraser’s screenplay (he’s written several of Meadows features, however this is credited rather obscurely as from an original idea by Mother Vision) quickly expanded and soon enough they had a feature-length narrative arc (despite the short feature running time). Meadows has always shot his films in the Nottingham area, where he grew up, but was excited about making something in London. However he was disconcerted by the patchwork colour scheme of the different buildings. He decided to shoot in black and white, and the result makes for a much more elegant and straight-forward story. The last epilogue montage sequence was shot in Super8 colour.
Thomas Turgoose (who debuted in This is England) plays fifteen-year-old Tomo who has abandoned his Nottingham trappings and ended up in Somers Town, an insular suburb between Euston Station and St. Pancras Station (near Kings Cross). He’s mugged by three lads, but a woman Jane, whom he’d met on the train, buys him breakfast. It’s here in the café that Tomo meets young Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a Polish immigrant of the same age, who loves taking photographs of the pretty waitress, Maria (Elisa Lasowski), who’s French and, as Tomo keeps remarking, very fit. Both boys quickly become friends with a shared infatuation with Maria, who’s at least five older than them.
The sub-plot shows the relationship between Marek and his young father Mariusz (Ireneusz Czop), who is working on the construction of the EuroStar rail, and spends his evenings drinking with his fellow ex-pat Poles. Marek feels lonely, so despite Tomo being so wildly different in temperament and personality the two lads strike up a bond, both strengthened and challenged by their shared adoration of Maria (Marek’s attraction seems more of “love”, whilst Tomo’s seems more of “lust”).
The subtlety of emotion director Meadows elicits from his actors has always been one of his strengths as a filmmaker. He balances comedy with drama with finesse. Somers Town is not a light drama, but then it’s not a broad comedy either. There are darker edges that sit in the shadows, yet Meadows and screenwriter Fraser are interested in bringing out the contrasts and the relationships on-screen; the father and son, the two boys, the two boys and the girl, and the two boys and Marek’s oddball neighbour, the opportunist salesman Graham (Perry Bensen) who ropes the lads into working for him, and whom Tomo eventually seeks refuge with.
Somers Town is an often very funny, ultimately rewarding, charcoal charm of a film that embraces life’s little ironies, and the wheelchair montage when Tomo and Marek push Maria around in a wheelchair echoes Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, which I’m sure Meadows and Fraser intended as a sly nod. When all else fails … friendship prevails.
Somers Town DVD is courtesy of Madman Entertainment, many thanks!
