A pleasantly trivial doodle of boyhood friendship in gritty north London
Somers Town (12A)
dir: Shane Meadows
Why are theatre audiences more outwardly enthusiastic than their cinema-going counterparts? I used to think it was etiquette; with the performers present in the same room, we feel obliged to offer overemphatic responses. But it can also be about value for money. When you pay £50 for your seat, as you routinely will in the West End, it's natural to expect a level of pleasure commensurate with the money spent, even if that means drumming up part of that pleasure yourself. And when the play is short, not all of us can refrain from counting the cost. Part of me was overjoyed that the excellent God of Carnage was so lean, even as my inner philistine was calculating the play-to-pound ratio (roughly 50p per minute) like a tightwad ogling the taxi meter.
This rarely happens in cinema. Not only is the medium more disposable and the seats cheaper, but you are as likely to find people complain that a film is too short as you are to hear them remark on the leniency of bank charges. (It can't be long before lawsuits are brought against Hollywood studios for cases of deep-vein thrombosis sustained while watching Sex and the City or The Dark Knight.)
In this climate, Shane Meadows's Somers Town should be a tonic. And it is, sort of: the director's strength lies in this kind of pleasantly inconsequential doodle, rather than the issue-driven This Is England. But it will be a charitable viewer who doesn't feel short-changed after paying up to £12 to see a film that clocks in at slightly over an hour. The distributor is banking on Meadows's name carrying enough clout to snare audiences, and this will probably be the case. But a double bill, like Aaron Katz's two-header Quiet City and Dance Party, USA, which played recently at the ICA in London, would have been less parsimonious.
What there is of Somers Town is mostly delightful. Thomas Turgoose, the young star of This Is England, whose blunt, weary face suggests he was raised in a working men's club, plays Tomo, a Nottingham lad who has run away to London. After being mugged by older kids, he becomes friends with the Polish teenager Marek (Piotr Jagiello), whose father, Mariusz (Ireneusz Czop), is a construction worker at King's Cross. The chums compete for the affections of a French waitress (Elisa Lasowski) and do odd jobs for a cheerfully vulgar conman (played by Perry Benson, an actor who makes Ricky Tomlinson look like Cary Grant). This uneventful portrait of the friendship, soothed along by Gavin Clarke and Ted Barnes's score and rendered by Natasha Braier's soft, monochrome cinematography, passes the time agreeably. The glimpses of Marek's life represent a small but potent drop of detergent in the oil slick that is the UK tabloids' smear campaign against Polish immigrants.
Somers Town still has one transparent and faintly troubling flaw. The picture originated as a promotional short by Meadows for the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras, which is why the original idea is credited to Mother Vision - not a nun with media ambitions, but the TV and film arm of the advertising agency Mother London. The short was then expanded by Meadows and the writer Paul Fraser, but its origins are easily discernible, like an old wallpaper pattern visible beneath a new coat of paint. "Today I went on a fast train under the sea," the awestruck Mariusz reports to his son in the film's most spurious scene. "Just imagine - it only takes a couple of hours!" I suppose we should be grateful that he stops short of reading out the number for the credit-card booking line.
One industry website describes Somers Town, in a revealing choice of words, as "the ad agency's first feature, directed by Shane Meadows". Which begs the question: Whose film is it anyway? Enough of Meadows's personality comes through to keep Somers Town the right side of the product placement threshold. Other film-makers who get tangled up in Mother's apron strings should remember that no audience worth having will hand over the price of a cinema ticket to watch a commercial, no matter what the running time.
Pick of the week
Summer Hours (12A)
dir: Olivier Assayas
Siblings divide up their late mother's assets in a well-observed drama.
Hellboy II: the Golden Army (12A)
dir: Guillermo del Toro
Visually sumptuous poppycock from the Pan's Labyrinth director.
Elegy (15)
dir: Isabel Coixet
Philip Roth's The Dying Animal adapted, with Ben Kingsley and Penélope Cruz.
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