Lesson 11: Oh I do like to be beside the seaside...

FROM LONDON TO BRIGHTON [1]

The film was  released in 2006 with the benefit of UK Film Council funding and a predominantly ‘amateur’ cast.  The initial filming cost approx £80,000 with later elements of post production etc taking the total cost to around £200,000.  The film grossed in the region of £500,000 worldwide in theatrical admissions.  It went on to earn more revenue through DVD release, DVD rentals and TV rights sales.

It is a hybrid – part crime film, part social documentary - that manages to blend the best of both genres.  The crime element is grim and unrelenting, the pursuit of a woman and young girl in order to exact revenge.  The social realism is the story of life amongst the desperate and the socially inadequate attempting to survive, let alone to make a life, in the lower reaches of modern urban Britain.

The criminals are in some respects stereotypes wielding shotguns and blades and conducting business via threats and intimidation – violence is the currency that underpins many of their exchanges. It is a world in which everything and everyone has a price – drugs, sex, loyalty.


 In this world, crime is not glamorous and the criminals themselves are far from glamorised.  They are British gangsters in the realms of Sweet Sixteen or Bullet Boy far removed from those that inhabit the almost ‘mythic’ criminal world of the films of Guy Ritchie or Matthew Vaughn – the folksy cockney gangster.  These are uncaring men, violent criminal men, and no matter how high up the food chain they might get they are at their core inadequates, each of them afraid and ashamed of something in themselves.  Stuart Allen is a sadist - a man capable of slicing Derek’s leg not just as a warning but simply just because he can - who is full of disgust of his father [Duncan] and the implicitly suggested fear that such repugnant urges might lie in himself.  Derek’s deepest fear is of losing respect and face amongst those he sees as less than himself and being found out for what he is – a pathetic abuser of women and those weaker than himself.   The world of From London To Brighton is a world of parasites feeding off smaller parasites, where the very victims of abuse themselves become abusers and in these actions absolve the audience of feeling any pity for them.  These are men beyond any notion of redemption.

MEDIA TERMS
A device you encountered in the AS examination 'Meet the Super-humans' was the use of ellipsis [the individual stories of the athletes implied from the use of flashbacks].  We are now exploring a text where this device plays a key part in the structure of the narrative and we need to focus some thoughts as to how and why [the vital A2 indicator]

ellipsis
noun

1. the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.

TASK:

How does the director use mise-en-scene to create a powerful start to the film?

Why do you think this is done?

What effect does ellipsis have on the way that we 'understand' the story?

Why do you think the director has structured the narrative in this way?