For as riotously entertaining as both Lock, Stock and Snatch were, Guy Ritchie has a lot to answer for. As international audiences were largely spared the brunt of the misery by a lack of international distribution, most Americans will never know the excruciating pain that even a single viewing of such piss poor clones the likes of Rancid Aluminum, The 51st State, and Love, Honor, and Obey can inflict. Thankfully these last few years have seen something of a moratorium on wearily hip tales of cock-er-ney wideboys and their harebrained, desperately ironic escapades, and with it a welcome return to the kind of arresting, gritty, and disgustingly grubby crime dramas Britain used to be very good at.
With that in mind we come to director Paul Andrew Williams's 2006 study of urban sickness London to Brighton, a grimy shoestring tale of an on-the-run prostitute, her underage ward and a perusing pimp; it serves as an unpleasant excursion into the sewers of contemporary Britain that leaves a genuinely nasty aftertaste that’s difficult to rinse. Opening with blistering immediacy somewhere indicated by the inter-title as “London, 3:07 a.m.,” we find battered prostitute Kelly (Stanley) crashing through a public toilet door. Her eye is swollen, her lip is split, and in her arms is a terrified, traumatized 12-year-old Joanne (Groome). Hanging around only long enough to catch a breath they hop a train to Brighton where Kelly has a friend that will let them crash a night or two.
Recalling the events of the evening in flashback, we learn of Kelly’s mission, ordered by her despicable pimp Derek (Harris), to take to the streets to find a pre-pubescent runaway girl to pleasure local underworld kingpin Duncan Allen (Morton). Cutting between events of the previous night and the frantic next day pursuit of Kelly and Joanne by Derek, we learn that it was an encounter that ended badly and bloodily and that Allen’s psychotic son Stuart (Spruell) now wants some answers. Shot mostly handheld for peanuts, Williams evokes a startling sense of place with a pungent aroma of unpleasant social decay. Watching these characters wade through a river of moral filth on their way to either death or salvation you can positively smell the muck.
Having assembled a uniformly excellent cast comprised entirely of relative unknowns, the relentless gutterspeak of these characters feels absolutely authentic whereas if sprinkled over lesser material might otherwise be almost gimmicky. Stanley in particular delivers a performance devoid of ego as the monstrously uncouth streetwalker, a role that’s not so much hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold as it is hooker suffering the intermittent conscious pangs of a serial user driven by a desperate sense of self-preservation. As her despicable, sleazy pimp Derek, Johnny Harris is brilliantly twitchy as the man on borrowed time all too aware of the fate that awaits him should he come up empty handed. As the quietly devilish Stuart Allen Spruell exudes wonderfully controlled menace, keeping the viewer guessing as to his ultimate intentions up to the final moments. But the real revelation here is Georgia Groome who has since worked with Williams on his follow up feature, the darkly comic The Cottage. Ably holding her own in each and every scene she anchors, Groome imbues Joanne with a reflexively confrontational nature that masks a naively innocent child desperately out of her depth
In the end Kelly’s reasons for aiding Joanne are never explicitly revealed; perhaps she sees something of her younger self in the girl, or perhaps leaving Joanne in the hands of such a monster was a bridge too far even for her. No matter, the lean nature of the script and the intelligent pacing of the plot deflect such musings anyhow. This is simply a film to admire (enjoy isn’t really the right word) from a fresh and talented director worthy of note.
DVD Bonus Features
This DVD includes eight additional deleted scenes, an original theatrical trailer, and a very detailed behind the scenes featurette with insights from the cast and crew. Also included is the original Georgia Groome audition tape, which illustrates exactly why Williams chose her for the role. Best of all is a twenty-five minute Q&A with the cast and director at the Curzon cinema in Soho that details every aspect of the production from concept to completion.
"London to Brighton" is on sale August 11, 2009 and is rated R. Crime. Written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams. Starring Alexander Morton, Georgia Groome, Johnny Harris, Lorraine Stanley, Nathan Constance, Sam Spruell.
