Somers Town, directed by Shane Meadows
If you go to the pictures at all regularly you'll be familiar with the adverts for Orange mobile phones that precede a lot of films these days: they show corporate sponsors from a telephone firm distorting and wrecking film concepts by always trying to get telephones into the picture. Don't let a phone ruin your film, they tell you, as a way of reminding you to switch yours off in the cinema. Well, Somers Town proves that corporate support - even close corporate in the idea underlying a movie - need not be corrosive or destructive. This is a genuinely good, interesting film which also manages to have an unusual, commercial star: Eurostar.
It's set in Camden in the shadow of the new St. Pancras terminal, where Marek's father works on construction to feed himself and his son who've moved from Poland following separation from Marek's mother. Tommo is a young drifter, a boy apparently without past of home, who leaves Nottingham for London in search of - well, he knows no better than we do. Marek and Tommo take up together and become friends; and the story is of their adventures and misadventures. I liked it. Not a lot, I'm tempted to say just in case you remember that catchphrase from Thatcherite times, because this is a short and slight film. There's a limit to the admiration it can inspire. But what there is is very good.
It's a self-consciously European film, which is rare for British films but which fits the Eurostar theme, of course. It's shot in black and white, a choice that at first seems prententious but which convinces as the film goes on, and not just because of the final sequence which uses notalgic home movie colour to suggest fantasy. The use of black and white also estranges you from London, focuses on character and serves the small chamber scope of the film. I liked the script, too. Only at a couple of places did the writers fail to make me believe what characters said: once they risked this for a joke about Tommo's clothes - would he really have talked about a female golfer? - and once when I wondered whether Tommo really would have known what ingredients would make up a simple French-style picnic. In contrast, the bullying scene seems entirely real, and everything the gang does and says completely credible. The only real problem I had with the film was that Tommo himself was not as sympathetic as I think was intended. At times I did wonder why Marek would really have bothered with him.
But, but, but. I'm niggling at it too much. On a smale scale this is a gem, with some excellent performances and characters (I was interested in Marek's dad and in the excellent comic creation Cutler). It mixes serious social realism with fun and dream with reality, and in its portrayal of teenage life presents a striking combination of street-wisdom and naivety. The moment when Tommo thinks Cutler's offer is more sinister than it really is tells you a lot about what it is to be a child in Britain today. Eurostar and Paris become things of dreams in a story that's about emotional and geographical displacement, as well as youth.
If this is what corporate support can do for a film, then I don't mind if there's a bit more of it. And Eurostar can be proud of themselves for having commissioned two excellent works, this and Michael Nyman's MGV - follow the link to hear one "region" of that piece. It's also featured in a Julian Barnes story and a novel by Milan Kundera, facts which must make it the world's most cultured railway, and which I must remember for some future pub quiz.
Mark Kermode agreed with me about Eurostar's funding for the movie; Sukhdev Sandhu in the Telegraph was also positive about it. Why James Christopher in the Times thought it needed to be crueller I have no idea: it seems to me that read right, it's quite a bleak, if kind, film. And Anthony Quinn in the Independent seems to me to have missed the point that the film works in spite of the holes he rightly identifies, which is a measure of how well it's realised. David Edwards in the Mirror perhaps goes over the top in the other direction but I think is right in his view that it's a minor gem.
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