Bleak street

>> British kitchen-sink realism meets
crime drama in the atmospheric but
underdeveloped London to Brighton

by MALCOLM FRASER

Our colonial masters the British are well known for having perfected a certain style of bleak street-level realism in their films—see Ken Loach or Mike Leigh. Writer/director Paul Andrew Williams applies this tendency to the crime drama in London to Brighton, a thriller of sorts that serves as a gritty counterpoint to the post-Tarantino pastiches of Guy Ritchie and his regrettable ilk.

The film begins unceremoniously in a public toilet stall, where street hooker Kelly (Lorraine Stanley) and twelve-year-old runaway Joanne (Georgia Groome) are plotting to skip town after an unspecified but obviously disastrous encounter that’s left them both bloodied and bruised. After they catch the titular train, it gradually unfolds that they’re on the run from Stanley’s thuggish pimp Derek (Johnny Harris), who was himself contracted by crime boss Stuart (Sam Spruell) to track them down. The film cuts back and forth between their attempted escape and the events that got them into this predicament.

The best scenes in the film are between Stanley and Groome; they’re fully believable, and the bond between them is genuinely touching. Groome ably captures both a tough-talking, smoke-puffing street kid persona and the vulnerability not far beneath it, and Stanley embodies the weariness of a veteran streetwalker without ever resorting to cliché.

Only in Britain would a filmmaker dare cast an actress who actually looks like someone you might see standing on the corner of a working-class neighbourhood, and Stanley’s already non-Hollywood face is uglied by a huge black eye that she sports for most of the film. The nasty shiner is almost like a metaphor for the underbelly in which the film is set; Williams seems determined to show the ugliness we would normally put out of sight and out of mind.

The film’s weak link is Spruell as the sinister crime boss. It’s no fault of his own—he performs with appropriate creepiness and controlled hostility—but the character is clichéd and underdeveloped, and provokes a climactic resolution that doesn’t really make any sense. The film succeeds in capturing the atmosphere of its setting, but in trying to combine kitchen-sink realism and heart-pounding dramatic suspense, Williams falls short of the requirements for either.

London to Brighton opens
this Friday, Feb. 8

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