EDEN LAKE - a middle-class nightmare

EDEN LAKE is a violent thriller movie comments on the British obsession with class. The plot is very simple: a middle-class couple is violently attacked by a gang of working class kids. The social commentary is more interesting. At first sight, the depiction of the working class characters looks dangerously like the worst sort of smug prejudice espoused by the British tabloid press. The parents are obese, selfish, crass and amoral. They don't actively parent their children, but leave them to roam, savage and near-feral. The kids have no respect, no courtesy, no sense of right and wrong and no boundaries. These are the kids that stab each other in clubs, happy-slap innocent bystanders and cause general mayhem. If this was all the film was, it would be pretty simplistic and insulting. But it's not. Writer-directer Michael Watkins takes care to show that the kids aren't mindless thugs, but products of their environment, and that they are extremely nervous about crossing the lines into outright violence. Moreover, the middle-class couple betray the same capacity for savagery as the kids. Michael Fassbender accurately conveys the smug confidence of the middle-class male. He refuses to be drawn into a scene of racial bullying - "boys will be boys" - but as soon as he's on the sharp end he becomes riled and aggressive. Kelly Reilly, however, has a far more interesting role. She begins as almost a spoof of the milksop middle-class girl - a harmless primary-school teacher, pained by bullying, eager to avoid trouble. When the worst occurs, she proves resourceful and clever but also goes on the classic "heart of darkness" journey. In extremis, she has the same capacity for feral savage revenge as the chavs. So, EDEN LAKE satisfies as a simple thriller, but it's also fairly nuanced in its social commentary - far more nuanced than some reviewers would have you believe. 

EDEN LAKE played Frightfest 2008 and is on release in the UK.

SOMERS TOWN - gritty humour undone by schmaltzy product placement

I'm a big fan of Shane Meadows' films and SOMERS TOWN didn't disappoint. It's a charming, laugh-out-loud funny story about a teenage boy called Tomo who leaves his no-hope life in the Midlands for London. He doesn't make it far from the railway station he arrives in - loitering in Somers Town - the area between Kings Cross and Euston. Despite being mugged, having no money and no plans, Tomo manages to survive, and even to have some laughs, through sheer bare-faced cheek. He sort of adopts a shy Polish kid called Marek and together they pash on a hot French waitress and earn money through some dodgy deals with a local Del-Boy.

Thomas Turgoose, the star of THIS IS ENGLAND, has grown up a lot but retains a winning mix of vulnerability and cheekiness as Tomo. Piotr Jagiello is sweet as his Polish side-kick. Meadows deserves praise for being able to elicit such natural performances from relatively inexperienced actors. As I said before, the movie is very, very funny, mostly because of Tomo's adolescent boasting, but also because of Perry Benson's larger-than-life wheeler-dealer. SOMERS TOWN also has some fine dramatic moments - not least an honest conversation between a Polish father and son.

My only problem with the film is its sense of unreality - the sheer ridiculousness of the fact that this young kid ships up in Camden and is basically taken in by a series of kind-hearted people. Even young Tomo can hardly believe it, questioning whether he'll have to perform sexual favours for his keep. I could almost forgive this deliberate "happy-go-lucky" atmosphere as an artistic choice, if it weren't for the final five minutes, all in colour, which basically serve as a sickly sweet ad for Eurostar. Imagine how good this film would've been if they'd have finished it as the two kids have their conversation on the balcony, Tomo returns to his polishing and they agree to meet up later......

He's definitely an actor to watch. SOMERS TOWN played Berlin 2008 and is currently on release in the UK.

THIS IS ENGLAND - powerful British tragi-comedy

THIS IS ENGLAND is a meticulously put-together tragicomedy from British writer-director, Shane Meadows. It's set in England during the early 1980s and the opening credits sequence is a montage of everything good and grim about that era: Roland Rat, Rubik's Cube, the Falklands War, the Miners' Strike and the Brixton Riots. It was a time of great economic upheaval and social unrest, but also of fantastic new movements in music and fashion. The movie channels all this contradictory nostalgia and repulsion into a single story set in a Midlands town among a gang of skin-heads. At first, Meadows implicitly argues that the movement as a whole and this gang in particular were a bunch of well-meaning kids who liked to dress a certain way and listen to a certain kind of music. But despite the no-nonsense urban look, it was at heart a multi-racial movement for working class white and black kids. This was especially reflected in Two-Tone music, some of which makes it to the movie's sound-track. In the film, the heart of this happy alliance takes the form of Woody (Joseph Gilgun), a love-able white skin-head who takes pity on a lonely, bolshie little 12 year old called Shaun. He buys him cool clothes, stops him from getting bullied and gives him someone look up to - something he's been missing since his dad died in the Falklands. Woody's also best mates with a West Indian skin-head called Milky (Andrew Shim). The first half of THIS IS ENGLAND shows the gang hanging out, having a laugh and indulging in the odd bit of casual violence. It's absolutely hysterical, laugh-out-loud cinema; excellently written and delivered with superb comic timing by the whole cast, but especially the young Thomas Turgoose.

But much as with the movement, the gang gets hijacked by a darker, nastier strain of violent racism when an ex-con called Combo (Stephen Graham) turns up. He sees a world of mass unemployment and social under-privelege and comes to resent the immigrant population for their apparent success - with appalling results. The second half of the movie ratchets up the tension, with tour-de-force dramatic exchanges. The only weakness is that the film has about three endings. What this means is that we get some provocative use of Falklands war footage. I'm not sure whether Meadows had any clear idea what he was trying to say with the juxtaposition of the domestic drama and these images. Moreover, we get a final shot that references THE 400 BLOWS and, to my mind, is a lot less powerful than it should've been because of this distraction.

THIS IS ENGLAND played Toronto and London 2006 and Berlin and Dublin 2007. It opens in the UK on Friday, in the US on July 27th and in Australia on August 16th.