London calls to Shane Meadows in Somers Town (1)

The titular neighborhood of Shane Meadows’ new film, Somers Town, is a small, working-class ward near the dead center of London. Bordered by a trio of railway stations, trains have been intersecting, running through, and stopping in Somers Town since the invention of the steam engine. Charles Dickens, that bard of English orphans, lived here as a child until his family was evicted and sent away. When lonely teenage runaway Tomo (Thomas Turgoose) steps off the train here at the beginning of Somers Town, he connects with a history as old as Dickens himself.

Played by the brilliant, young Turgoose, Tomo bears little resemblance to those pathetically sad orphans of 19th-century London, or even the cinematic hoodlums of Hollywood. He mumbles about his parents in between bites of a sandwich, “They’re just people that I know, useless wastes of space like me.” No melodramatic soundtrack bursts in at this moment, nor does Tomo well up in tears or find a building to vandalize. He just keeps eating his sandwich.

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(Image by Dean Rogers)