Left Field Cinema

The year is 1983 and amongst Roland Rat, Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands we find Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), an eleven-year-old boy short on friends living with his mum. Taken in by a gang on skinheads their friendship and high jinx becomes a release for Shaun’s frustrations. However when ex-gang member Combo arrives back from prison things take a darker turn.

Director Shane Meadows excels in capturing the colour, sights and sounds of the early eighties, he is clearly at home here in more than one respect. The opening sequence with footage of The Falklands is quite brilliant and sets the film up. An idle destruction of the empty warehouse by the gang is also a very clever, no frills way of introducing background to both the characters and the period; they’re high-spirited boys who need an outlet, but they’re not bad and they settle their differences by dialogue not violence. Herein lies the difference between the gang and Combo.

The performances of the cast are outstanding, Meadows again here elicits empathetic naturalistic portrayals from some of his regular actors and Turgoose is a revelation in his first film role. Steven Graham is both terrifying and pathetic in equal measure as the desperately lost Combo, and it is truly to his credit that we ever feel a moment’s pity for this viciously hateful character.

The film deals with many micro themes and philosophies; the stability of the family, the lack of a father figure and the dangers in choosing an inappropriate ‘surrogate’; the skinhead and two-tone movements and how they were overlapped and subverted by the National Front – not least in others perception of those movements -; the zeitgeist of the early eighties post Falklands Britain; the desire to belong to a group and be defined by a uniform.

Above all else This is England is an intimately personal film and it is no surprise to learn that much is based on Meadows own experiences. Most viewers will share at least some of these experiences if not the memory of that time, if not the film does and excellent job of taking them as close as is possible.

M. Davison