An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
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Music
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London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Shane Meadows.
Cast: Piotr Jagiello, Thomas Turgoose, Ireneusz Czop, Elisa Lasowski, Perry Benson, Kate Dickie
Description: Sixteen-year-old runaway Tommo arrives in London with a bag of clothes and a little cash to his name. Mugged for his belongings, he wanders the streets begging for food and shelter, eventually finding a friend in Polish immigrant Marek, whose father Marius is a labourer on the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras. Marek agrees to hide Tommo in the cramped flat he shares with Marius, and the two boys become unlikely buddies, even harbouring a crush on the same French waitress. However, Tommo cannot live unseen forever in the apartment, forcing the youngster to make hard choices about his future.
Country: UK. 2008. 71mins
Out on his own: Thomas Turgoose plays a teenager who ends up in London's Somers Town after running away from his Nottingham home
Gentle drama: Somers Town is a genuinely pleasant watch
Ever since This Is England, Shane Meadows's first and well-deserved box-office success, few have had anything but kind words to say about his capacity to infect contemporary reality with his own kind of humanity, humour and freshness of approach.
This gentle drama, the first he has constructed away from his Midlands milieu, was originally a 20-minute short commissioned by Eurostar with the only proviso that the Channel rail crossing was mentioned somewhere.
It has now been expanded into a short, slightly whimsical feature about Tommo, a runaway from Nottingham who arrives virtually penniless in London and tries his luck in Somers Town, near the massive King's Cross redevelopment.
He is played by Thomas Turgoose, who was very much the young star of This Is England and is a natural for this sort of thing, largely because he has the capacity to look both innocent and knowing at roughly the same time.
Almost instantly set upon and beaten up by a local gang, Tommo befriends Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a young Pole, whose father is working on the building site.
Both have problems. Tommo wants somewhere to sleep and Marek wants to be a photographer but is saddled with a father who prefers beer to art and wants him to do some real work.
They both fall for Maria (Elisa Lasowski), an attractive French waitress in a local greasy spoon, take part in various scams conducted by a local dodger (Perry Benson) and in the end manage to visit her when she has left for Paris.
This last episode, the only one in colour, may be a fantasy but it ends the film with as much hope as Meadows can muster for Tommo, a natural survivor within a world that is not so much cruel as unheeding.
Unwisely dubbed the "premier British film of the year" and "better than Ken Loach", Somers Town has a screenplay by Paul Fraser, which often sounds improvised, some nice music by Gavin Clarke, and photography of Somers Town by Argentinian Natasha Braier that summons up the none-too-salubrious area well. It is a genuinely pleasant watch.
However, it is never quite tough enough to convince entirely.
It's as if Meadows is determined to find more than a sliver of optimism in streets where an innate pessimism would be a more usual response.
That is all very well, but runaways do not have quite such cheerfully unconfrontational lives as this.
A bit more of their difficulties - with drugs, for instance - might have given the fable more impact.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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