This is England

A great film. Vibrant and beautifully made, This is England is a stark reminder of the ragged England of the early 80's, a time which seemed to combine all the worst aspects of capitalism - laissez-faire, militaristic, socially fractured and often just plain ugly.
This film throws us in at the deep end of this untempting era, tracing the life of Shaun, a young boy in a northern English town who has to come to terms with his father's death in the Falklands war, his own problems at school, and his mother's benignly neglectful attitude (under a scary 80's perm, she prefers to watch Blockbusters rather than deal with her son's emotional problems).
In this grim context, Shaun happens upon and is adopted by a group of skinheads who offer him friendship and self-esteem. While the skins are a slightly rough lot, they are not at this point racists. In fact one of their number, Milky, is black. But as the film progresses, we see how far-right "England first" elements come to dominate the scene. And here we reach what is the film's main theme: the insidious slide into racism that marked the skinhead subculture's path through the eighties.
As such it's an interesting story, but too much of a cultural footnote to support a whole feature film. But director Shane Meadows manages to take this subject matter and imbue it with a significance beyond its historical context. What is the nature of individual and national identity? How do we constitute our self images, and to what extent is the individual consciousness a product of social, economic and political forces, rather than the precious flame of liberty that some liberals would like to believe in? All these questions are raised, displayed and rotated before us in a compelling and ambivalent way. Anyone who moans about today's obsession with labels and brands should take a look at this film as a reminder that this kind of thing was already happening back then.
The film's look is rough and ready, an unsentimental representation in a rawly realistic mode. The one thing the had me a little confused was the geography. The characters all talk in Northern accents, but where we are is somehow indeterminate as West Yorkshire, Scouse and east coast accents mingle. Not a big criticism, but the only one I could find in this otherwise remarkable film.