This is England

“This Is England”

I first heard of this film in 2007. I heard Shane Meadows, the film’s director being interviewed on BBC Radio. He was very interesting, and the more he talked about his film, the more I wanted to see it. Unfortunately the film was not on general release in Japan at that time. Then in 2009 I was in the UK on holiday when I saw the DVD on sale in a shop. It was only a couple of pounds and I could not understand why it was so cheap. DVDs in the UK usually cost more than £10. ‘Perhaps the film was not a success,’ I remember thinking to myself. Not expecting a great deal, I decided to buy it anyway and see what it was like.

When I put the DVD in my computer and started watching, I was immediately taken back to the 1980s. The film starts with TV news images of the period, showing scenes from the Falklands War and the miners’ strike. There are clips showing the Rubik’s Cube, CDs being made, and even someone playing Space Invaders. All these things were major events in my teenage years. I was born in 1964, and was sixteen when the Eighties began. Seeing the news clips of that time at the start of “This Is England” reminded me of what it felt like to be at school in Thatcher’s Britain.

The hero of this film is a boy called Shaun. He lives with his mother in a drab northern city. They do not have much money because his father was killed in the Falklands War. Shaun misses him a lot. At school he is teased because his clothes are out of fashion. When an older boy makes a joke about his dead father, Shaun gets into a fight. On his way home from school, he meets Woody, a skinhead who is sitting in a subway with his friends. Woody and Shaun become friends, and before long Shaun becomes a skinhead. From being a lonely boy with no enthusiasm for life, Shaun becomes confident and popular. He gets a new haircut, new clothes, and even gets a girlfriend. But what starts with laughter and friendship ends with shocking brutality.

I would recommend this film to anyone who likes “Billy Elliot”. It is about a young boy growing up in the north of England in the 1980s, and trying to find his way in the world.