Somers Town - 16 May 2010

Principal cast: Thomas Turgoose, Piotr Jagiello, Ireneusz Czop, Eliza Lasowski

Film notes: Director Shane Meadows (Once Upon a Time In the Midlands; This is England) is known for a body of work set in the Midlands and for his penchant for short films. Meadows makes it out of the Midlands, and just makes it into the feature film bracket, with this snappy, mostly happy story of a teen friendship struck up in one of the capital cities of Europe—London. Tomo is a runaway teenager from Nottingham, who takes up with Marek, a lonely Polish boy living in the central-London area of the title, between King's Cross, St Pancras, and Euston stations. There's no momentous narrative development here: the teenage boys meet, talk with Marek's dad, mess about, flirt with a French waitress, encounter folk on the street, contemplate taking the train to Paris via the nearby Chunnel. Yet the film has a winning way of presenting the charms and the grit of the English Euro-city, with its multiethnic cast of characters. Shot, in the main, in black and white, the film displays a certain grain of socio-economic difficulty. But homelessness, migration, young love, inter-cultural friendship, are all so many ingredients out of which Meadows makes a "likely lad" of a film. 

In some ways, this is a film the British cinema has made many times before, but Somers Town is interesting as an example of the Europification of youth cinema, in the wake of films such as The Spanish Apartment. Connoisseurs of English cinema will spot allusions to Richard Lester's The Knack. Philip French, cinema critic for The Observer, sees in Somers Town a reconciliation of Meadows' healthy provincialism with the "swinging London" tradition of British cinema.