London to Brighton Paul Andrew Williams UK 2006
London to Brighton should have won. It was in competition for the Michael Powell Award for best British feature at the Edinburgh Film Festival 2006. It didn’t win - that privilege went to the not undeserving Brothers of the Head. One reason for losing out may have been the tang of a stock British gangster film associated with the bad old times of late 1990s film funding where features were made as tax dodges which never needed to be shown. That London to Brighton did walk away with the New Directors award at the festival does suggest that the selecting jury clearly wanted to give the film something.
Johnny Harris is the reason London to Brighton is so good. His character and acting give the film kudos recalling great British gangster films of yesteryear like The Long Good Friday or Get Carter where the bad guy is the focus. As Derek a small time London pimp in way over his head, Harris is radiant as he effortlessly switches between slimy charisma and bullying violence. Despite his skinhead it’s where the character uses basic niceties in such a barefaced way to coerce people into doing what he wants that it becomes apparent that the character is truly damned. Like any great turn though the chance for redemption hovers throughout.
Near the start we are introduced to Derek being roguishly lovable to a girl across a kitchen table in a rather grimy kitchen. Amongst declarations such as ‘You’re the one’ the impression is firmly that he idolises her. A sucker-punch is coming and duly does – he insists that she have sex with the two guys in the room next door who have travelled a long way for her services. He is a pimp, she is his girl and we now know how eloquently Derek can talk to get his own way. After this petty betrayal Derek’s stock can only plummet as the plot proper unfurls and he assumes the characteristics of a rat struggling to avoid drowning in a sack.
London to Brighton is a harrowing child-prostitution drama that genuinely surprises despite the seemingly familiar plot. Opening with a young girl and a prostitute, Joanne and Kelly, hiding in a public toilet it is evident that something bad has happened, something that leads to Derek. The girls go on the run and Derek is forced to go after them. He was asked to procure a young girl for a gangland boss and when the boss is attacked by the girls Derek is told in no uncertain terms to retrieve them. The relationship between Joanne and Kelly drives the film as Kelly tries to protect Joanne, occasionally by touting for business despite her bruises to buy them both something to eat. Both performances provide a real heart to the film.
Director Paul Andrew Williams takes a load of genre tropes - the child-abusing mob boss, the tart with a heart, the dammed foot soldier etc - and muddles them all about with a good script and even better acting. At the finale London to Brighton so fully invests its key characters with grim life that the outcome is absolutely shocking and unexpected.
One of the delights of the film are the odd glimpses of beauty. Joanne gazes out of the train window from London across tracking fields only for the cut to shift across to Derek looking out across bolted and chained up rows of squalid shops from a car. Or the brief concentration the camera gives (in American Beauty style) to discarded paper cups fluttering away in the breeze past some bins on the Brighton sea front. Once again, as in Last Resort, the direness of a social situation is contrasted with the end-of-the-world feeling of openness of the British seaside. This is a horrible world yet somehow scenes emerge that give one hope for going on.
Regrettably London to Brighton, like so many tabloid newspapers, uses the paedophile card to sell itself as a demanding drama but can’t match this with the other surprises it holds. Whilst there is no problem condemning Derek, Kelly is complicit at the start in helping him before going on to help Joanne escape. In the film’s hardest to bear scene, she sits downstairs in a sterile lounge while upstairs we can hear muffled, constricted sounds. Kelly does eventually step in kicking the plot off but that uncomfortable gap where she waits and does nothing except sip her vodka sap her moral credibility. Derek is given no such chance to intervene and becomes the villain.
This is but a minor gripe in an otherwise great film. How better to finish than on the key strength: Derek. When meeting with the gangsters he has a shotgun on him which is quickly confiscated. He impotently asks for it to be returned as it has been borrowed.
