This Is England is a feature length film, running for
around 101 minutes, which was released in 2006 and directed by Shane Meadows, a
man who is particularly known and famous for working with projects involving
the social realism genre. The film was created by, the equally well-known names
to work with the genre, Film 4 and Warp Films and was distributed by Optimum
Releasing (or their name nowadays, StudioCanal UK); the same company who are
very well known for focusing strongly on distributing films that strongly
revolve around culture and the ways in which different countries live and
explore film.
You can view the trailer for This Is England below:
This Is England’s plot is based around a young boy of
age 12 who’s father died in the Falklands War and how he and his life is
influenced by his areas ‘skinhead’ groups. He begins to join gangs and live amongst
quite violently led people. The film shows how he begins to look at people as
role models and how they influence his own behaviour, suggesting how easy it is
for children in those sorts of environments to gain the same anti-socialist
attitudes in the working class, poor estate area he lives in. The film is also
led with ideas of ‘white’ culture and how much it conflicted with people of
other ethnicities in those days, as well as being relatable to some corrupt
people in our modern times also.
In this film, there are themes of racism, violence,
masculinity, culture, political corruptness, gangs and shows the contemporary life that people used
to, and in some cases still do, live with in some areas of the United Kingdom
A lot of the
environments and settings in the film are quite similar and all follow a
grubby, grungy or broken style, as well as share a very similar mise-en-scene. I took key frames of some key environments in
the film, and we can see from these the settings are all looking very rough, exhausted
and lacking proper upkeep or care.
These descriptions come from the fact that
almost every setting in the film has certain aspects to their designs that give
this image off; such as graffiti or tags on at least one surface, overall grubbiness, dirt or
untidiness, stained with various forms of dirt or liquids and covered with rubbish and broken items in some cases. All of these items would be typically seen in various poorer areas of the United Kingdom, making the mise-en-scene of this film very accurate and realistic.
One of the scenes
that stand out to me is a long-shot outside of a church. Although it might not
be an important or even essential clip in the film, I felt it presented a lot
of detail and representation of themes in the social realism genre.
In particular, the fact there is graffiti, including some profanity, even outside of a church, a place with is almost always associated with peace and harmony. Yet it is covered in a form of tagging where someone had found it necessary to revel against society even in such a religious place.
The fact that the gang members are also hanging outside the place, trying to look as masculine as possible, is also a good representation of real people in my opinion. It shows the rebellion of people and how they lack care for simple things that could possibly make their lives a lot simpler and maybe even more optimistic, but are instead being seemingly run on pure gang culture and other anti-social behaviours that could only have a negative effect on their lives. It's quite ironic really considering a lot of characters in social realistic films complain about their lives being 'dead-ends' or bad overall, perhaps this is a small pointer outer to the audience?
Another aspect to point out about this film was that all
of the actors were one of two things; either completely new to acting and
having no experience in it what so ever, or they only ever had strong experience
in working with directors and films of the social realist genre. They would
have also only been given brief scripting of the scenes they would act in
(giving an overall outcome or any important messages etc), allowing the actors
to improvise and show how they would expect the characters to act or scenes to be
played out. This technique of
casting is used frequently in film of the social realism genre, as it creates a
raw, realistic look to a characters actions, rather than following a script of
what a director or writer would THINK is the authentic way to act in the film.
It is however a risky move to make in case the actors end up not entirely
knowing what to say or giving a boring scene. However, these would have been
avoided using takes or post-production cuts.
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