"This is England" - A blast from the past

I saw a film called "This is England" yesterday. It's a film that reminded me a lot of what it felt like to grow up in 1980’s Britain. The time of Margaret Thatcher, the Falklands War, the Miners Strike, mass unemployment, union busting and... Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet.

It was a time when it felt like everyone was politically engaged, yet at the same time, there was a disconnect in out popular culture. The music sounded plastic and disposable after the homemade ethos of punk. "Wine bars" were popping up and filling with people who would soon be known as "yuppies".

To my 12-year old eyes it seemed that people in the UK were involved in all manner of politics; the working class may have been under seige from Thatcher's goons at home but people still found the time to protest apartheid in South Africa, CIA-death squads in Latin America, and also time to support the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Amnesty International. The apathy that besets society today was nowhere to be seen back then.

This film delves right into the middle of this. The main character is a little boy whose Dad died in the Falklands war and in order to fill the hole in his life he ends up joining the gang of local skinheads - a gang that is really more harmless than anything at first, skinheads were not always nazis, the movement was originally about the music and the clothes. Music that came mostly from Jamaica with first wave of West Indian immigrants to the UK. Here is an interesting breakdown of skiinhead culture.

The problems arise when “Combo”, a racist skin gets out of prison and returns to take over the gang. The innocence is gone is and the ideology of the gang changes from a bunch of ska-loving kids to a fascist mob.

At it’s heart this is a pretty straight forward coming of age movie, but, to a guy who was pretty much the same age as the main character at the time when this is set, seeing this film was like getting a postcard from the past.

Stephen Graham who plays “Combo” is absolutely incredible in his part. He is every bit as scary as Ben Kingsley was in “Sexy Beast” (another great UK movie) and the tension he creates on screen is sometimes almost unbearable to watch.

There are a few obvious rip-off scenes in the movie from “A Clockwork Orange”, so obvious in fact, that I can only think they were a deliberate tribute. Despite this however, this is a movie well worth checking out.