This review was originally published during the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. Somers Town opens at Film Forum in New York on Wednesday.
I saw six films at Tribeca this weekend, and five of them were completely blown off the map by Somers Town, Shane Meadows’ practically perfect follow-up to his 2007 triumph, This is England. England was one of my favorite films of last year, but its political/historical aims, admittedly, occasionally overwhelmed Meadows’ more subtle, character-based observations. Somers Town is less ambitious but more impressive, a 70-minute portrait of a moment with zero fat to cut and not a false note.
Like England, Somers stars young Thomas Turgoose as a British teen in search of identity through a surrogate family, but in every way Somers is the tighter, more precise work. Shot mainly in black-and-white in the streets, shops and flats of contemporary London, Somers tracks the friendship between Tomo (Turgoose), a crafty ball of wounded bravado who runs away from his Midlands home and promptly gets mugged, and Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a lonely Polish boy about the same age who secretly sequesters Tomo in the small apartment he shares with his oft-absent construction worker dad. Budding photographer Marek divides his time working odd jobs for a semi-sleazy neighbor, and shyly flirting with Maria, a local French waitress who is friendly but probably a couple of years out of his league. Tomo quickly proves to be adept at both activities, and the boys soon fall into a routine, working together for the funds to fuel their mutual woo.
The dynamic between the two boys is minutely observed, often poignant and very funny. Tomo, in particular, is competitive on every front, but both boys seem to have a silent understanding that they need each other more than either needs to win. When Maria bids farewell one evening with the sing-song salutation, “I love you both the same,” Tomo and Marek don’t fight––they high-five. Maria seems to understand that her role in this barely-pubescent menage a trois is not to pick one or the other, or even to let both down easy, but to function as the catalyst for Tomo and Marek to come together, to project their individual longings for affection towards a common goal and ultimately gain strength from one another. This idea comes across beautifully in the film’s coda, a trip to Paris shot on low-gauge color film stock, a pleasingly gauzy bit of nostalgia that feels softer and less cynical than anything I’ve previously seen in a Meadows film.
Somers Town was originally planned as a short designed to promote the Eurostar rail line, and its eventual promotion to feature length brings two issues to mind. First, it’s not the only feature in Tribeca’s World Narrative Feature Competition that could very well have been relegated to a sidebar––certainly, films like My Marlon and Brando (formally experimental, if ultimately narratively incompetent) and Let The Right One In (the Swedish vampire film that is so far hands down the most talked about film at this festival) are unlikely to find slots in a major competition elsewhere. For all the criticism leveled at their program Tribeca deserves praise for implementing a curation strategy blind to traditional but ultimately arbitrary distinctions of prestige.
And second, speaking of arbitrary distinctions of prestige: the day after I saw Somers Town, I went to a triumphant sold out screening of Behn Zeitlin’s short Glory at Sea; the day before, we learned that The Pleasure of Being Robbed, another short feature that started life as a promotional short, has been selected as the only American film in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. These are all films that are receiving an enormous amount of attention–and deservedly so–but imagine if Josh Safdie and Shane Meadows’ films had been submitted to festivals at their original intended lengths. Would anyone have taken them nearly as seriously if they had been relegated to a shorts program, or tacked in front of a two-hour feature? Glory at Sea did make its debut within a shorts program at SXSW, but it was singled out by a number of writers for coverage like no short film I’ve ever seen. The rise of web video distribution has created an audience for shorts that far outnumbers the traditional festival audience for features. If critics and festival programmers continue to make it a point to take shorter works seriously, their ghettoization as standard practice might soon be a thing of the past.
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