Somers Town

Somers Town

70 Minutes

Somers Town is a work of integrity; a touching, delightful piece of dream-cinema that bristles with spirit and good humor. It’s a story about friendship and the joy of being young and alive in the most unlikely of circumstances. From the first frame of this lyrical and enchanting portrait of growing up in a British city, just like its unfortunate heroes, the film wants to be your friend and in turn you want the film to do well. It feels right and you want to go on feeling right along with it.

Thomas Turgoose (the baby-faced skinhead Shaun in Shane Meadows’ last feature, This Is England) plays 16 year-old Tomo, who has fled to London after a difficult childhood in Nottingham. He rapidly gets mugged, losing his money and bag, and, surprisingly undeterred, wanders the streets before meeting Marek (Piotr Jagiello), the shy son of Polish construction worker Mariusz (Ireneusz Czop) at a King’s Cross cafe. From then on the film becomes a buddy movie, with the two boys competing for the attentions of a young French waitress working in the cafe, and trying to find ways to make quick cash. There are some rich themes here – immigration, homelessness and finding ways to survive in London’s urban gloom – yet Meadows foregoes the grim realism of This is England and opts for a light and whimsical approach.

Tomo the wisecracker and Marek the straight man are an unlikely comedy duo. Tomo is lively, always forced to fend for himself and Marek, who’s neglected by his hard-drinking father and misses his mother back home, is awkward and shy. But together, and sometimes in the company of Maria, they form a solidarity that transcends their differences. Pushing their beloved through the streets in a customized wheelchair, swigging wine in a playground, they, like all young people, have created their own enchanted world, one that will make viewers smile and laugh.

Paul Fraser’s script is enhanced by naturalistic and improvised performances. Turgoose combines his lugubrious, pasty features and exquisite comic timing with panache, while Jagiello uses droll understatement to amusing effect. Turgoose picks up where he left off in This is England with another sterling performance of both the humanity and naivety required to sell a character who steals ladies clothes from a launderette and ends up looking like a “female golfer” when he’s forced to wear them. The dialogue rings true of everything in modern life and every idiom and reference is carefully thought out and honest. The scenes with Turgoose and Jagiello sparkle with all the enjoyment that comes at the beginning of new relationships, where everything is in the future; intriguing and undiscovered.

There is grace in the way Meadows shoots the north of London; it looks amazingly vibrant and as foreign to the audience as it is supposed to be to the two protagonists. The black and white cinematography is reminiscent 1960s Polish New Wave, and is aware of the cold beauty of this manufactured landscape whose changes mirror those of the characters who are transitioning from adolescence to adulthood, from small cities to a huge metropolis, from isolation to companionship.

Comedy requires a feeling for irony, a sense of the absurd, a certain contact with reality and a surprising affection for one’s characters and Meadows has these qualities in spades. Almost every scene – Marek trying to persuade Tomo to defecate in a plastic bag so as not to be discovered by his father; the first time the boys get drunk; Tomo polishing silverware while wearing a lady’s apron – abounds with absurdity, realism and kindness rather than mockery. Somers Town may not have the far reaching social analysis of This is England or the balletic masculinity of Dead Man’s Shoes, but more than anything, it has a heart that beats, bleeds, scrapes by, gets pissed off and is young and in love.

by Teri Carson