Shane Meadows' new film is entirely funded by Eurostar and comes spiced with a few favourable references to the company's high-speed rail link between London and Paris. At the end of the film, it even takes a trip aboard the train itself and we are treated to a lustrous montage of Montmartre, the Eiffel Tower and the Jardin du Luxembourg. According to its makers, Somers Town is as much a pureblood Shane Meadows film as Dead Man's Shoes or This is England. But CNN describes it as "essentially an advert", while the Wikipedia entry defines it as a "covert advertising campaign".
"People should judge it by the fruits on the tree," Meadows told me when I spoke to him earlier this week. He argues that film-makers should always be prepared to hunt out new avenues of finance, stressing that taking money from a private company is not necessarily any more compromising than taking it from FilmFour or Pathe.
And perhaps he has a point here. It may be that we are guilty of a widespread naivety over the way in which films are produced, blissfully unaware of the hoops that independent film-makers must jump through in order to get their hands on the cash. Their mission is to balance their creative impulse with the demands of the marketplace. In this respect they are all attempting to grow flowers (or fruit) out of manure.
As it happens, I liked Somers Town a lot. It lacks the muscle and the ferocity of This is England (alongside Control, my favourite British film from last year), and the basic story is perhaps cranked out a little past its natural length. Even so it remains a tough, tender drama from one of the UK's finest film-makers. If only those fleeting Eurostar references didn't get in the way. It's like having a really good friend who, every now and then, tries to interest you in a timeshare scheme. You have to keep a eye on it.
While Somers Town has already played at a number of festivals, it isn't actually released in the UK until Friday. Then it will be judged by its fruit. But for now, what do make of the concept? Is it an ingenious move on Meadows' part? Or is it a worrying compromise? Is the fact that a film comes backed by one single company a cause for concern? Or is it (as producer Barnaby Spurrier argues) no more than a form of artistic patronage? Who's the organ grinder in all of this? And who's the monkey?
