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TIFF 2006 Preview: Discovery: London To Brighton
London to Brighton, we suspect, has been named mischievously. Only two random points on a map to most people, it sounds like a film about a journey.
Considering that going from London to Brighton takes about an hour on the train, you couldn’t fill up a film with that even in real time. The film does feature the titular trip, though – the trip of a teenage runaway and a battered prostitute on the run from a recent past that isn’t revealed until late into the film.
Suffice to say this is the kind of dark film about the criminal underbelly in London that most people would lazily refer to as “gritty”, and it certainly does feel, more than anything, that it was conceived to be just that; gritty: without any particular concern for the shortcuts in character motivation and plotting that were required to keep up an unrelenting grimness.
It does have moments of levity, if you’re clued in enough to spot them (I love the fact that in Britain even if you’re about to kill someone you make a cup of tea first) and the first half an hour of so has a driving intensity, but it all starts to fall apart by the conclusion. Indeed, the ending makes so little sense that we had to think about it for half an hour or so to imagine something that it could satisfactorily mean; that’s not clever, it’s just poorly explained. There’s no soul to this film; it feels cynically produced to fill a demographic. 2/5