This is England

This Is England premiered at the Toronto Film Festival back in September 2006, and was in the London Film Festival last October.  It also won two prizes at the British Independent Film Awards in November 2006: Most Promising Newcomer (Onscreen) for 14-year-old Thomas Turgoose; and the big one, Best Independent British Feature.  But it doesn't open in the UK until April 27, again, like The Lives of Others and Half Nelson, presumably because it doesn't want to compete for its audience with all of the Oscar®-type films clogging screens in January, February and March.  But Shane Meadows' fifth feature film will be worth the wait.

Set in a small town suggestive of both the north Midlands and Yorkshire, the film takes place in the summer of 1983, a year after the end of the Falklands War.  Turgoose plays young Shaun, whose soldier dad died in the conflict, and whose mum dresses him in unfashionable clothes that get him bullied at school.  But when he's accepted into the local gang of skinheads, thanks to the friendly overtures of nice-guy Woody (Joe Gilgun), his horizons open.  Then the return to the gang, from prison, of the scary Combo (Stephen Graham, from Snatch) creates divisions and introduces Shaun to the racist, violent aspect of skinhead culture.  Opinions are divided over Meadows' oeuvre: his second feature A Room For Romeo Brass (1999) has a lot of champions; most people agree the follow-up Once Upon A Time In The Midlands was an unsuccessful attempt to impose a mainstream sensibility on the director; and most would also concur that his lowest-budget feature to date, revenge thriller Dead Man's Shoes, represented a creative regeneration. For me, This Is England is his best film yet, and one that somehow connects to all his previous features and makes sense of them as a coherent body of work. 

This Is England represents the first time Shane Meadows has worked with the same producer twice, Sheffield-based Warp Films Mark Herbert, who also produced Dead Man's Shoes. Reports suggest that Shane is a passionate filmmaker who doesn't always give producers a smooth ride, so it's great that he's clearly found in Herbert a soul mate who is capable of bringing the best out of him.  Herbert won the 2006 Alfred Dunhill-sponsored UK Film Talent Award, given to a first-time writer, director or producer each year at the London Film Festival.  It was a well-deserved honour.

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