London to Brighton

London to Brighton at first seems like a movie you would have always wanted to make after being inspired by watching Amorres Perros and Mike Leigh’s Naked, back-to-back, in good proportion and shortly after, having won a filming camera in a short-film contest. You don’t need sets or props to make a film like Naked or Amores Perros, you don’t really need a camera crew to aid you in making such a film. You just need a good story, and maybe some skill in scriptwriting (if one is sensible enough to know the difference). Apart from a bit of hard work, it’s fairly easy. That’s what the film makers want you to think. Or so YOU think. The non-linear, parallel story-line narrative has by now been used and over used so many times in movies these days; you might think the scriptwriters either have no sense of originality, or wanton disregard for content and more than desirable focus on hammering in their style until their films stop feeling like one and ends up looking like a mangled, uncouth, badly drafted film-school thesis. But too much of mainstream film-watching can flatten your mind, requiring you to look down upon those other films that are made with tighter budgets, with more worries than prospects. This was the kind of attitude with which I settled down to watch London to Brighton. The first ten minutes later, I was still stubborn to my opinion. I yawned.
Half-an hour later, I was watching the movie once again from the start, this time with a notepad file open on my toolbar.
The familiar, hazy uncertainness lingers for the first five minutes or so. Two prostitutes: One middle aged, the other no older than fifteen are thrown at your feet through the doors of a London cubicle toilet. The time is an unearthly 0230 hrs. The older lady is bleeding profusely. Her eye is swollen into a lemon-sized thing with a slit for the eye. The little girl looks so scared out of her senses; she’d dive headfirst into the toilet bowl if you told her it could help save her life. A while later, the two are on a train fleeing London and heading to Brighton. Fleeing, because the girl asks if Derek was following them.
Introducing Derek, a ruthless pimp in London, who gets contacted by an underworld criminal who looks like he’s fractured every single bone in his face, and is currently undergoing smile-therapy from a Japanese samurai. Two villains: one a pimp, the second by profession, two women fleeing and one bloody eye. Something fits. Flashbacks. Suddenly, you spot a pedophile in between. You already know that both women are on the run, which was evident from the prologue. A British indie film definitely has to have people chasing and tracking you, when you’re on the run. Title says London to Brighton, and you think well, there’s your plot. Well, not exactly. Not until you’re through all the way, with that wonderful culmination in the final reel.
Being adapted from a short-film titled ‘Royalty’ by Williams, the screenplay is as lean as a prize featherweight boxer, no saggy tag ons, no sub plots to bog the story down, just a hard as nails story, that drags you in very swiftly. The scenes intercut, between what’s happening and what happened in rapid, intriguing ways, but the most interesting aspect of the narration is something so trivial, you’d never notice it at first, and god forbid you never noticed even after you watched the film. It’s the linear handle in the form of the older lady’s lemon-sized swollen eye. If it weren’t for this little beacon, we would sure find a hard time figuring out when the events are unfolding, and you’d most certainly have to press that rewind button one too many times.
‘London to Brighton’ has been likened to Mike Leigh’s Naked, and perhaps this is an apt comparison, perhaps not. Both have very similar portrayals of Britain’s gutter-standard of living, yet both end up seeming quite philosophical towards the end. But what triggers the philosophical twists keep these two films apart as far as possible. What remains clear, however, is that Williams has served up a deliciously gritty and unflinching drama in the midst of chaos, which he occasionally pauses with wonderful slow-motion captures and dreamy shots of the windy barren boardwalk of Brighton.
The narrative somehow stays clear of Kelly’s brief ordeals to get ’some quick money’. We really don’t know if she’s disgusted by her own vocation, or has a very impersonal attitude, a behavioral format that keeps her mind sane. At least that’s what I could conceive, or why else would an emotionally hardened woman, who seems pretty experienced in her line of work suddenly look at this young girl in a sympathetic way?? And all this, after she practically broils the huge pot of sh*t herself: she actually goes scouting for juvenile girls and spots Joanne. She lures the little girl herself into the horrifying trap, with professional calmness. She buys the girl food and offers her ‘work’. In other words, she’s loaded the gun and cocked the hammer herself. And then, there comes the inevitable change of mind at the pimp’s client’s place. The pedophilic man was freaking sixty, and he was rich. Doesn’t that make things fairly clear that his motive is plain kink? Maybe Kelly was having second thoughts all the while, and she’s just too confused to think under the lamp. Or maybe she has a past, one that involves a child that she so badly wants to forget, that her way of going into denial is to bruise her own body by prostituting herself. Maybe the director wants us to know that psychologically, London isn’t all that happy and gay as we think it is, people there are living in quiet despair and ruined lifestyles, this being just the whipped cream atop a stale, fungus infested meat-pie. Atleast, I’d like to think the director was trying to make a point here. Other than this twinkle of a plot-hole, London to Brighton wastes no time in filing away your nail-points with its racy, harried camera work.
Bruised, realistic, harrowing and compelling, with very good performances put in by both the female lead actors: Georgia Groome, Lorraine Stanely and Johnny Harris; professional, by industry standards  – a very good watch. Makes you want to watch something excessively cheerful as soon as possible, once the credits roll. Considering the fact that I’ve been watching too many movies that brood and howl, I ran straight into Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s chocolate-candy coloured paris to watch Micmacs à tire-larigot

By Fazil (at PassionForCinema.com)
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