James Cross
posted 5 June 2007

I always find it hard to appreciate the appeal of watching violent films, and even harder to understand the attraction of watching race hatred on screen. ‘This is England’ is about angry youths, frustrated punks and indignant thugs lashing out against the ‘enemy’ – the immigrants who ‘take their jobs’. If it does nothing else, this film takes you to the roots of a very adult brand of violence and shows you its cultivation from the seedbed of childhood and adolescence.

Aggression is rarely attractive in this film, because it is almost always misplaced, and bursts out of nowhere to harrow the viewer. This makes for an intensely watchable, but also a deeply depressing and uncomfortable movie that deliberately asks the audience to reflect on the motivation behind the attacks and rampages it portrays.

The film takes as its focus a 12 year old boy, Shaun, whose Dad has died fighting in the early 1980s Falklands War (a particularly futile war that mirrors the particularly futile racially-motivated aggression later in the film). Sean, an assertive, courageous and lovable kid is miserable at the loss of his father. He is being picked on at school. He manages to step up through the ranks of the playground into a gang of older youths who, after some tender and funny moments of teenage madness, lead Shaun into the hands of Combo, an ‘original 1969 punk’ who has just come out of prison.

At this point in the film, the teenage ebullience gives way to something more sinister: a vision of more developed, repressive tensions and a lack of control made all the more disconcerting by the presence and involvement of 12 year-old Shaun. Combo takes Shaun to a political rally of a nationalist party where Combo finds reasons to let of steam and an enemy to attack.

The result is a compelling vision of a man who searches desperately for a sense of belonging, and hides all this behind a thin façade of inflated pride and sickening aggression.

For me the film was all about Combo. Shaun served as a device that allowed the audience to empathise with this man, who brings out all that is attractive in a marginalised, unhappy skinhead. Shaun finds in Combo a replacement father, Combo finds in Shaun a glimpse of himself at 12 years old (Combo also has a troubled family background). The film suggests Combo might have been unable to deal with an emotional problem at a young age. Now the sense we get of his feelings of inadequacy are frightening.

Go one level deeper and the connection with the Falklands War makes you wonder if there is not something of Combo in all of us who call ourselves English. But I’ll leave that one to you. England in this film is, for all its characters and by implication for the audience too, a very personal, individual, and complicated notion. There’s nothing straightforward about racial tensions just like there’s nothing straightforward about our reasons for war.

The performance of Thomas Turgoose, who plays Shaun, is outstanding, and more than that surprising. The film plays with the fact that Shaun is half the size of any of the other characters – not least when he gets a girlfriend. At first, I found it hard to believe that any 12-year-old could be as street-wise as he was and kept thinking of Billy Elliot – I was half-expecting a quick plié or tap routine in the midst of these social tensions. But the film holds together and Sean’s complement in Combo shows you, I think, why he is there and why he has to be a 12-year-old boy. Also exciting and humorous is watching the rites of passage and prickly self-consciousness of teenage gangland, which must have been difficult to capture realistically.

This is a powerful, emotional, thought-provoking picture that builds on the British realist tradition of cinema. This brand of realism is not for the easily depressed, however. It is hard not to leave the cinema reminded of real-life examples of the film’s melancholic meditation on race, culture and clan.