Somers Town (12A)
Starring Thomas Turgoose, Piotr Jagiello. Directed by Shane Meadows.SHANE Meadows' This Is England was, so far as many people were concerned, one of the very best British films of the last few years.
One of the most remarkable features of the film, a coming-of-age tale set in the Midlands, was the starring role from Thomas Turgoose, a young lad completely inexperienced as an actor who delivered a wonderful performance as the bewildered youth who finds himself part of a racist gang.
Turgoose (pictured) reappears in Meadows' latest, a film that had improbable beginnings even by the standards of his low-budget efforts.
"When it was first put to me in the spring or summer of 2007," Shane recalls, "I was told that Eurostar wanted to make a feature film about kids, possibly in Paris or possibly in London - places that the Eurostar went to. When I heard it was a feature film with commercial backing, I thought `it's not really my cup of tea'.
"My worry was that it was going to be shots of blokes in trains smiling, patting kids on the head and saying, `Have a nice day on the Eurostar!' I couldn't quite understand why they'd asked me, so I pulled out of the project.
"Then I said they should speak to Paul Fraser, the guy I'd co-written with, because he's worked on a couple of kids' feature film scripts that are currently in development. And I said, if they wanted to develop that, then maybe I'd look at it further down the line. A couple of months later, I heard from Fraser that they were going to make a short film and once he'd got the script, would I mind looking at it?
Carte blanche
"So I was really happy, read the script and it was fantastic. I was quite baffled that they were going to give me carte blanche to make it as if it was my own film."
Set in the London neighbourhood between the three railway termini of Euston, St Pancras and King's Cross, it follows the exploits of Midlands runaway Tommo (Turgoose), who arrives in London completely unprepared for life in the big city. Then he runs into the similarly-aged Marek (Piotr Jagiello), the son of a Polish labourer Marius (Ireneusz Czop) who's working on the new Eurostar terminal.
After a rocky start, the pair pal up and together they run into a twenty-something French café waitress named Maria (Elisa Lasowski). Both try to win her affections, but it's not only the obvious obstacles that are in their way.
"I fell in love with it when I saw the relationship between the two boys," remembers Shane. "This idea of this rough, renegade kid from the Midlands and this sweet, artistic lad from Poland, who's quite lonely. They get forced together and fall in love with this French waitress. It reminded me of a lot of New Wave French cinema, and I thought, 'I'd like to have a go at it.'
Expand
"We laid out this 10-day shoot, and a couple of days rehearsal, and when we started to rehearse, things started to expand. The father and son, Piotr and Ireneusz, were from Poland, and they gelled really quickly.
"The additional freedom that I had from Eurostar sponsoring it was that it didn't matter how long or short it was so when I cut it I was able to simply make it work at the perfect length for the story in its own right."
Somers Town is Shane's first project set outside his native Midlands and also the first time he's worked on a script that he hasn't been involved in writing. It's quite possibly the best thing he's done so far, and any admirers of This Is England or his earlier films will find plenty of his trademark humour and grit.
"Somers Town was this fantastic accident," he admits. "I decided to take a year off after This Is England, to take stock and look at doing a bigger project. In my year off, which was meant to be my quietest year.
"I made Somers Town, then I made another film with Paddy Considine, called Le Donk, which was meant to be a short but turned into a feature. I also made a film about my granddad in Thailand, which was meant to be a holiday, and a film about a musician called Gavin Clark. So it turned out to be my busiest year ever when I was meant to be taking it easy!
"Out of all of them Somers Town was the biggest surprise to me. I love it in some ways more than my other films, because there was no pressure on it and you can tell that from the film. It's a lot more light-hearted, not like my last two films, where the end of the film leaves people reeling.
"I think sometimes when you've been given millions and millions, you feel under pressure that you've got to hit all these big major notes all the time. Somers Town was made on a micro budget so, although it was accidental that it came out, it was actually a fantastic step for me."
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Reviewed: Thu, 21 August, 2008
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