London to Brighton is a well-made film. It features commendable performances from unknowns, taut direction, and one fine scene where the gangster’s son meets his father’s killer. The technical proficiency is impressive, a masterly handling of a limited budget. However, I do have a couple of caveats.
These are: at points it seemed to me as though this film was an A grade in the British film-making A-level. With its nod to the british gangster genre (Long Good Friday etc) and vague Loach-ish hints in the characterisation of the runaway. Getting an A in any system cannot be criticised – unless you don’t rate the system. Another British gangster flick which seems less likely to have been in the director’s or producers’ mind would be Performance, a demented film that does its damndest to break narrative conventions rather than re-affirm them, thus breaking character conventions and filmic conventions. What grade would Performance have got?
Whilst some do not hold Performance in high regard, most rate Taxi Driver, that doyen of Anglo American film culture. Like London To Brighton, Taxi Driver manipulates the audience’s relationship with a pubescent girl at risk, knowing that an audience would want her to come to no harm. It’s an effective semiotic device – the innocent abroad in the big bad world. Scorsese’s unstinting exploration of Bickle’s personality, forcing the audience to side with the psychopath’s tender side, was a bold, devastating treatment of this theme. It took the audience to the same dark place Jodie Foster had found herself entering, the sewer of the city. (‘The sewer’ being a word the psychopathic son likes to use to describe the London world the UK runaway finds herself lost in.) London to Brighton lets its audience off Scorsese’s hook. It lacks passion: the runaway becomes a cog in a plot, a final hug from her grandmother seems perfunctory; the audience ambles out stirred but barely shaken.
The point of all this is that cinema has both a Pavlovian and a Brechtian effect on its audience. Film which makes us think twice, which makes us marvel or despair, will manipulate our Pavlovian instincts and then make us reflect as we participate – (perhaps by our just going – how can I watch this?). London to Brighton is a functional film which generates functional responses effectively. Whilst it’s churlish to criticise competence, it may be reasonable to long for ambition.
These are: at points it seemed to me as though this film was an A grade in the British film-making A-level. With its nod to the british gangster genre (Long Good Friday etc) and vague Loach-ish hints in the characterisation of the runaway. Getting an A in any system cannot be criticised – unless you don’t rate the system. Another British gangster flick which seems less likely to have been in the director’s or producers’ mind would be Performance, a demented film that does its damndest to break narrative conventions rather than re-affirm them, thus breaking character conventions and filmic conventions. What grade would Performance have got?
Whilst some do not hold Performance in high regard, most rate Taxi Driver, that doyen of Anglo American film culture. Like London To Brighton, Taxi Driver manipulates the audience’s relationship with a pubescent girl at risk, knowing that an audience would want her to come to no harm. It’s an effective semiotic device – the innocent abroad in the big bad world. Scorsese’s unstinting exploration of Bickle’s personality, forcing the audience to side with the psychopath’s tender side, was a bold, devastating treatment of this theme. It took the audience to the same dark place Jodie Foster had found herself entering, the sewer of the city. (‘The sewer’ being a word the psychopathic son likes to use to describe the London world the UK runaway finds herself lost in.) London to Brighton lets its audience off Scorsese’s hook. It lacks passion: the runaway becomes a cog in a plot, a final hug from her grandmother seems perfunctory; the audience ambles out stirred but barely shaken.
The point of all this is that cinema has both a Pavlovian and a Brechtian effect on its audience. Film which makes us think twice, which makes us marvel or despair, will manipulate our Pavlovian instincts and then make us reflect as we participate – (perhaps by our just going – how can I watch this?). London to Brighton is a functional film which generates functional responses effectively. Whilst it’s churlish to criticise competence, it may be reasonable to long for ambition.
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