EIFF Blog: Shane Meadows in gentle, pleasant film shock!

Surely I'm not losing my touch? This intrepid, adventuring journalist has temporarily lost his not-quite-so-original whip, fedora and trusty steed (OK his trademark suit, pad of paper and dictaphone) for a night and missed a raft of events and parties due to be being an ageing crone and needing to lie down for an it's-all-a-bit-much-sometimes.

Every day at the film festival I'm surrounded by younger versions of myself, who fuelled on coffee, cigarettes and last night's free bevvy, pinball between the cinemas, from press junket to premiere, from party to....well, more parties. In the good old days, I used to see between six and eight films or events a day followed by a couple of drinks receptions and maybe one proper party at the end, but now I have difficulty in actually finding the film festival never mind remembering that I'm supposed to go to it.

One has to pace oneself, especially if you have to write a blog, rustle up a review or transcribe an interview. This means that you have to be more selective in what you see and allow yourself a bit of a lie in from time to time. One can do this by ditching films which are soon to be released but even that can prove difficult if it's a hot ticket accompanied by a talk from the cast and crew. Now I manage about two events a day and maybe one party. Oh God, how tedious your life must be Mr Blogger: free films and parties - what a shame, you poor sod, we really sympathise, no really I feel for you as I work my ass off in my 9 to 5 job and take care of my kids every morning & night never getting a chance to catch a DVD never mind a film premiere. But then again, I'm doing this so you dont have to.

But I did manage to make the Birds Eye View reception and the Three Miles North of Molkon party last Friday night, both just as the free bevvy ran out. In the Penthouse Suite venue which has magnificent views of the city in every direction from the top of the Point Hotel, 90% of the guests were crushed into the tiny smoking balcony whilst the rest of the guests wandered around the spacious main room admiring the sunset (or was it the dawn? - you can never tell at this time of year when it's late) through the massive plate glass windows.

Later I traipsed down to the Warp X party for Donkey Punch and A Complete History of my Sexual Failures at The Caves which must be one of Edinburgh's finest venues with its maze of cavernous vaults, its balcony and chillout room which looks like its been created from a giant bank vault with sliding locking door, deer heads on the wall and empty wine bottles.

It was a proper free bar this time and naturally there was a crush of the usual mix of humanity, the desperate, the bewildered, the gracious and the obnoxious all trying to get their ten pints, six gin and tonics and eight flaming manhattans or whatever the hell those things were (a hallucination?).

The respective cast and crews of the aforementioned films were there as was Shane Meadows and Danny Huston (star of The Kreutzer Sonata, Bernard Rose's new opus showing today) who up close looks 20 years younger than his screen personas betray. Perhaps he took his recent role as a vampire in 30 Days of Night a bit more seriously than anyone realised. There's method acting and then there's 'method acting'. He looks good and looked like he was having a whale of a time chatting to anyone and everyone.

So apart from these events (day three), I managed not a single press screening but I did catch the premiere of Shane Meadows new opus Somers Town. In fact I had to make sure I could get in as no back up DVD copy was available to view in the press room, apparently at Shane Meadows request. I'm not sure if this is true, but of course I'd rather see anything on the big screen anyway, so being forced to go to the premiere having missed the press screening wasn't exactly a painful compromise.

I'm a big fan of Meadows work except for the mess that was Once Upon A Time in the Midlands. If you know his films you'll know they're usually suburban set, gritty, working class dramas that often feature one character who shapeshifts into something else. There's always an undercurrent of about-to-explode (and often does) tension and violence building up throughout with characters radically transformed by their experiences.

It's all delivered with documentary style visual panache and gallows humour. Meadows' particular gift is for observing how humans really run into each other. How they really talk, with clumsy, shuffling awkwardness and comic bumbling mishaps, or with insecurity and fear.

A good example is the scene in Somers Town where the young Thomas Turgoose, diminutive star of This is England is wound up by three teenagers in a prelude to a violent assualt. It's put together exactly the way it happens for real. It's happened to me, I've seen see it happen to others too many times for comfort and the dialogue I could have recorded from real life.

So there's much to live up to, particularly after the brilliant Dead Man's Shoes and Room for Romeo Brass set the standard and sealed his trademark techniques. Which is why it was a bit of a surprise to sit though this ambling, warm-hearted, gentle comedy with a more conventional narrative style than we're used to. I say gentle for despite the brief and only violent assualt near the start of the film there are no undercurrents of incredible tension, no roits to reggae or gas-masked, acid-tripping murders taking place in this. Instead it's life affirming. Some of the comedy even verges on Chapline-esque slapstick.

The premise is simple - young Tomo runs away from home and runs into Marek, an equally bored Polish teenager ignored by his hard working and hard drinking father. Together they form an uneasy alliance and friendship as they trundle around Somers Town (an area of London near Kings Cross) chasing their favourite French waitress, nicking laundry and wheeling and dealing. That's it. That's the story.

It ends happily and although there's a few tense moments and confrontations they're not on the same scale as previous offerings. Perhaps this is explained by the fact that this was initially intended as a simple short film which grew into a feature as it was being made.

Its use of (beautiful) black and white photography was, as Meadows explained at the screening, devised simply to make the Somers Town locations visually bearable as it was just too damn ugly in real life in colour. It's an enjoyable and pleasant film, nothing to get worked up about, but definitely worth seeing. It's well acted by the entire cast and was marred only in my opinion by what felt like a tacked on ending that was implausibly fairytale and bordered on a Hollywood style resolution. Meadows however is still a quality observer of real people and real life and although I enjoyed it, I was a tad underwhelmed.

The next post will be on yesterday's Errol Morris talk.