At just 70 minutes, Shane Meadows's film is short, sweet, and winning, a miniature narrative of the London friendship between Tomo (Thomas Turgoose), a scrappy runaway kid from Nottingham, and Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a strait-laced, lonely-boy immigrant from Warsaw.
Bonding in the London area of the title (where Marek's dad is working on a rail link), they hang about, they steal a basket of laundry and try on the clothes, they get drunk, they get crushes on a cute French waitress, they go wild when she kisses them on the cheek.
The film reunites Meadows and his untrained-actor star Turgoose after their previous triumph, This Is England. That movie about Britain's politically disaffected was tough, hard, and angry. Somers Town is gentle, funny, blue-collar humanism, much like the early films of Ken Loach.
