What Town? Somers what? Somers Town is a place name that appears on the London A-Z street map, superimposed in capitals on the area around St Pancras and King's Cross, tending to baffle those Londoners who notice it. Flagging down a taxi and saying "Somers Town - and step on it!" is asking for anything from a blank stare to a smack in the face, because nobody actually uses this name, apart from estate agents or local historians or possibly students of Ackroydian psychogeography, keen to excavate its occult associations as the birthplace of Mary Shelley and Dan Leno.
Certainly nobody uses it in this film, despite the fact that it is, of course, set there. But this quaint name, derived from the long-forgotten Somers landowning family and without any downmarket associations, looks as though it may be revived in line with the area's general gentrification and sprucing up, a commercial resurgence led by the new Eurostar rail link terminus being established at St Pancras. (This newspaper is soon moving its offices nearby.) And Eurostar itself has, remarkably, sponsored this entire movie, the latest from the prolific British director Shane Meadows and his longtime screenwriter, Paul Fraser.
It's a slight, gentle, sweet-natured comedy shot in black and white, and blessed with a lovely performance from Meadows' great find, Thomas Turgoose, the teenage star of his previous film This Is England. Turgoose here develops his gift for comedy playing Tomo, a cheeky, open-faced lad from Nottingham. Running away from a broken home, Tomo gets off the train in London without the foggiest clue about what to do or where to stay. After a hair-raising introduction to London street crime, Tomo befriends dreamy, lonely Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a Polish boy whose dad Mariusz (Ireneusz Czop) is a construction worker working on the Eurostar terminal. Marek has a crush on local French waitress Maria (Elisa Lasowski) and soon Tomo decides he too is in love with her, and Elisa gets into an affectionate, Jules-et-Jim-type friendship with her two unthreatening courtiers. But when she vanishes, heartbreakingly, back to Paris, our two heroes vow to track her down. On Eurostar of course.
Some may sniff at Shane Meadows' decision to take the Eurostar shilling. But so what? Meadows appears to have accepted their help in the same cheerful spirit that novelist Fay Weldon took sponsorship from the jeweller Bulgari. There's plenty of pro-Eurostar stuff here, and Meadows obviously doesn't feel any great need to put balancing material in the screenplay about the advantages of an easyJet flight to Charles De Gaulle. The plugs are noticeable, but they never get in the way. Alex Cox says the true independent film-maker is the truest entrepreneur, never too proud to investigate any source of funding to get his film made, and I can't for the life of me think of any commercial concern I'd rather see promoted in a British feature film than Eurostar.
My reservations about Somers Town have nothing to do with sponsorship - it's the fact Somers Town is basically a short film stretched and stretched to make a feature film, but falling well short. When the credits rolled, I was left with the uneasy impression that an entire third act had somehow gone missing, lopped off the end: a final stage in the script that would develop, complicate and then resolve the friendship between Marek and Tomo in France, and their bittersweet love triangle with Maria. The feature felt maddeningly undeveloped and unfinished - maddening, because there's so much in it that is good.
Turgoose has a natural flair for laughs: especially when he starts telling Marek, with an air of spurious authority, that he, Tomo, is Maria's rightful boyfriend. With his insolent, unreliable smirk, combined with heartbreaking vulnerability and innocence, Turgoose looks like a cross between Ronnie Barker and Richard Beckinsale in Porridge; he's a true likely lad, like a young James Bolam, or perhaps the standup comics Ken Loach recruited to star in his excellent, underrated rail privatisation drama The Navigators, from 2001. Remarkably, he is still only 16: I could easily imagine Turgoose being a stand-up comedy star in his own right.
Part of the charm of Somers Town is the fact that Meadows hasn't topped it off with the flourish of violence that he has often used in the past as an arbitrary device to close off the storyline. Despite its serious moments, it's a happy, sunny film and this is attractive. It has long been a bee in my bonnet that Meadows' film-making is more accessible, more human and more convincing when he isn't playing the tough guy.
Yet it's frustrating. Somers Town is something between acorn and oak: not quite the lovely coming-of-age comedy it could have been. It is simply too slight, and perhaps this 75-minute almost-feature should be offered to the ticket-buying public with one or maybe two of Meadows's excellent short films in support, just so they get their money's worth. What a cracking performance from Turgoose, though.