This_Is_England

“This is England” This is England is a very powerful drama film that shows the terrible horrors of racism in 1983. The British director Shane Meadows shows through is movie the skinhead subcultures and captures the palpable anger of impoverished youth, without money or jobs or hope, seeking to blame society for their problems. The skinhead culture was taken up by black and white working class kids, who bonded over a love of reggae, ska and soul music and who tried to find a kind of English identity, embracing a style formed by braces, suites, boots and Cromby hat atop heads shaved. “This is England” is based on experiences of director Shane Meadows and it’s a story about a troubled 12-years- old boy, Shaun that lives in England. The movie is taut, tense and relentless. It shows why Shaun feels he needs to belong to a gang, what he gets out of it and how it goes wrong. Without saying so, it also explains why skinheads are skinheads. In the summer of 1983, after living school, Shane, wondering alone, meets a group of skinheads, Woody’s gang. Woody has some strong moral values, he is kind, supportive and unprejudiced and becomes the father-figure Shaun so desperately needs because Shaun real father died in the Falklands War. With Woody and his friendly friends, Shaun discovers a new way of living: girls, parties and a new look. They give to the boy a new haircut (shaved hair) and new clothes ( Ben Sherman shirt and Doc Martin boots). Shaun gains, being with this group of skinheads, two extremely important things in his life, a friendship group and a role model, two important factors that influence a person’s behaviour. The situation and atmosphere in the movie change with the arrival of Woody’s friend, Combo who sets himself the leader of the gang and who demands loyalty regarding his racist views. Woody refuses to agree and the gang splits. Combo manipulates Shaun into staying and deliberately takes on the role of being a mentor and a substitute father for the 12-years-old boy. He sees in this young boy himself and one day he takes him to the National Front meeting. The National Front was promoting a deteriorating sense of nationalistic English heritage, and a sense of racial and social purity and its symbol was the flag of St. George’s Cross. One of this flags is tosses into the sea by Shaun at the end of the movie. Combo and Woody represent two different figures of skinheads subculture, the kind and the nasty. Hard men like Combo made skinhead reputation grew and made this group to be perceived as fascists because the National Front and the British National Party deliberately exploited their disaffection. Combo is a deeply damaged person and the roots of his hatred are the fear that England is being stolen from him and the jealousy for those who have what he wants, such as a loving family (the black skinhead Milky has it) or money (regarding the incident with the Asian shopkeeper). Combo behaviour and his brutality leaves Shaun, at the end of the movie, terrified, traumatized and betrayed. “This is England” is an amazing and realistic look back at time where almost all the young people in England were skinheads or New Romantics or Mods and the Thatcher era atmosphere, the fashion sense and the music are captured perfectly. The movie has a amazing soundtrack of early skinhead reggae tunes, including several singles by Toots and The Maytals and The Upsetters, combined with contemporary 80s Tone and pop hits by The Specials, Dexys Midnight Runners and others and is played over a collage of media clips from England of that period and the Falklands War. The collage gives us a terrific mood setter for the film. “This is England” represented a new kind of cinema that brought many controversies. The movie may be set in the English Midlands in 1983 but it’s relevant today as it was then. It is a movie that shocks you, a movie from which everyone has something to learn, a movie that shows us a cruel reality and the consequences of hatred. An honest, emotional, deeply impressive portrait of growing up, a shocking recreation of a working-class England and an intimate story of one childhood’s brutal end make this movie a movie that must be seen.