Somers Town

Directed by Shane Meadows, starring Elisa Lasowski, Ireneusz Czop and Kate Dickie

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 (pictured left), 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, pictured right), 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.

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.

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.

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. The Guardian