There Ain’t No Cure For My Somers Town Blues

*And The Ladykillers.

Yes the Ladykillers does a (slightly more soundstagey) Somers Town better as well.

The only whimsy in the film would have been spoiled by Laurence Corner (and they never go that far west!) – namely Tommo being reduced to wearing an old lady skirt as a shirt. Which is funny and all, but makes no sense as one of the only other plot points in the first ten minutes of the film has Marek giving up his Man Utd shirt for an Arsenal one. He could have given Tommo the Man U shirt.

yes, i didn’t read it quite as brutally as pete — i rather liked it, in fact, and plenty of london is as unpeopled* as this plenty of the time, most of the working day in fact — but he’s right to say that meadows has transferred his mounting “have to get out of this place” frustration at non-london locations to london; he sees it as a junction between coventry and europe

i think the point about not straying more than 200 yards from where you land up is good observation, actually (possibly this is not so obvious to someone who’s been visiting london** all his life; but this is what we outlanders do, i promise you, until we meet someone who can show us round, and marek and tommo meet each other) — actually the trick meadows was bribed by eurostar to miss is that he should have made this a advert for (eg) the north london line rather than eurostar

also i really liked the weird dysjunction of tommo’s and marek’s make-do friendship — if they had their heads screwed on it would indeed be a different film

*it’s an auteur tic: his midlands and his north are also strangely empty
**i didn’t have time in SS to expand on me “what happens when you expand kitchen sink londonwards = something REALLY strange viz straight to india and the maharishi”, which is fact london-hating, bcz the uk is in fact (in its angry back-to-back heart) london-hating!

actually i must totally repitch my “kitchen sink: london” project to s&s — it’s a bit daft making this film review the repository of the entire thing!

no Kylie, no Eurostar ad cred

black-and-white doesn’t make it drabber! it is anti-london — i think this is your strongest argument by miles — because SM thinks the colour version of somers town is uglier than this version

(i have been infected by lindsay anderson here obv: b/w is “poetic” he sez abt 20 billion times) (and in fact come to think of it, this film reminds me of my favourite bits of “the white bus”, which are also the mainly unpeopled bits) (i just like films which are really more about forgotten and unloved buildings than people i guess)

they’re not mediocre characters, they’re just unformed — graham has a certain dotty charisma; the girl is a wisp; marek’s dad i could have done with more of

a better comparison for yr argument — which it will come off way worse against — is “stranger than paradise”: it has the same plot (more or less) and was a founding movie in self-financed indie cinema, so you get the moral high ground re the funding here

it’s true that what i probably liked about this film is exactly what you’re most disliking: viz the idea of a holiday from the Endless Tyranny of High Concept (“at last a portrait of london”; “narrative arc for character”; “something er happens plz thx”) — i liked that it was just a fragment, a snapshot of the hoping moment of coping freed from the cruelty of the indication of why this would fail — i liked that instead of the actually really annoying little-man-comes-of-age ending of TIE, it just punted into a “why not” fantasy — i think meadows has an affectionate rather than a disdainful eye for present-day functional architecture (portakabins; social housing forecourts, balconies and walkways); he likes the transient feel of london-as-a-waystation and has no interest in london-the-great-multiculti-wen-of-ages… hence OF COURSE slides right past john soane, heritage that would mean nothing to people who don’t really why they’re in london, except that they don’t want to be somewhere/anywhere else (which IS irrationally unfair to london, but this wasn’t a film about people with the luxury of long-view rationalism)

it struck me as i watched, what i distinctly warmed to that i was missing from films, that i felt i had once been promised, was exactly this sense of flimsy provisionality that the nouvelle vague long ago held up against anglo-film; and free cinema held up against Classic British Cinema; and the early amerindies briefly held up against hollywood

what has always happened to these challenges — why the promise is never maintained — was a kind of creeping formalist aestheticisation, which replaces Justification By Moral Intent and/or Outcome, with Justification by High-Concept Technique (great cinematagraphy, for example)

i guess what i was reminded of was a kind of punky throwaway i-don’t-careness — eg don’t care that turgoose isn’t that good of an actor — which is the thing that would quickly congeal into post-punk indie anti-quality, and become intolerable and fearful of ambition or commitment to achievement; but was/is an incredibly liberating impulse when it comes to hand-me-down stuff about What A Film Ought To Do…

meadows is at his worst when he’s moralising; i really like it when he cuts away from that and just lets the camera follow what might happen, the oddity and the semi-randomness of that (ie tommo ending up as graham’s bitch; or marek’s dad so crestfallen at the lame crappiness of marek’s “party”) — this is vanishingly tiny stuff, and SM swamps it quite easily (less here than in TIE) when he starts to worrry about the “point” of what he’s doing; but i really really wish more people would do it… of course as soon as there’s a formalised space for it, it would stop being what i like about it, i guess