Tribeca Film Festival Review: Somers Town

Phil Nugent — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Somers Town reunites the talented writer-director Shane Meadows with Thomas Turgoose, the amazing, fifteen-year-old star of Meadows's previous film, the scalding This Is England. In that movie, Turgoose, playing an emotionally bewildered young skinhead, looked like an eleven-year-old boy with a fifty-year-old face. In Somers Town, which begins with Turgoose's character, Tommo, running away from his home in the midlands, arriving in the title location, and promptly getting stomped and picked clean by three sneering little thugs, turns out to be a kind of buddy comedy, and Turgoose proves himself a surprisingly deft comedian. Tommo strikes up a friendship with Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a sixteen-year-old polish immigrant who has a crush on a French waitress named Maria (Elisa Lasowski). After getting a look at her, Tommo very reasonably decides that he has a crush on her too, and, looking up at her face as it towers over him somewhere in the clouds, he immediately puts her verbal moves on her. He may look a little like a potato with sleep apnea, but having come all the way to the big city (it's big to him) in search of something better, and having discovered that something better is standing in a cafe holding a tray and asking if he wants another glass of water, he isn't about to just let the opportunity pass by. The little bastard is so convinced that he's smooth that he half-convinces you.

Shot in black and white and running just seventy minutes, Somers Town feels like a goof coming after This Is England and Meadows's violent revenge thriller Dead Man's Shoes, and it's a welcome goof. (It might be even more welcome if it were five or ten minutes shorter, if the cuts came from the final section, a color montage of happy-happy images showing Tommo and Marek visiting Maria in Paris. It's so trite that it makes you wonder if happiness is such a rare currency in Meadows's films because all he knows about the stuff is what he's seen in TV commercials.) Mostly, the film makes the audience happy, especially when Perry Benson is on-screen as Graham, the latest model in a current English movie tradition of heavyset, motor-mouthed characters who are part P. T. Barnum, part Fagin, and part affable, middle-aged big brother. (He introduces himself to Marek by giving him a jersey with the name of a local football team on it, urging him to pull it on over the jersey with the name of another team that he's already wearing, before somebody kills him over it. Both Graham and Marek proceed from this point under the shared assumption that this gesture has earned him Marek's indentured servitude.) And Thomas Turgoose remains a man to watch. After his performance as an inarticulate character in This Is England, Somers Town gives him the chance to work a wholly different set of muscles, and he's in clover in such moments here as the one where, having patiently listened to Marek insisting that Maria's his girlfriend even though they haven't kissed, he breaks it to his friend that that's just not how they do it in England.

The Screengrab : elisa lasowski

Tribeca Film Festival Review: Somers Town