My favorite thing about this movie is Lorraine Stanley as Kelly. The script is great, but her take on it is what makes it such a stand-out. And I love that she looks like a real person and not a starlet. She reminds me a bit of Sacha Horler from Praise, a fantastic 1998 Australian movie about another character who uses sex as a form of empowerment. But London to Brighton is so gritty and matter-of-fact about Kelly’s sexuality. She calls it “going to work” (contrast this to how sex is parleyed to Joanne as “playing”) and the shot of her fucking the guy in the car is chilling. Her face is a grimace, much like a guy lifting something heavy at his job. Pain? Effort? Determination? And I love the character development in the preceding scene in which she sets the price with the guy.
“How much?” he asks.
“Thirty quid.”
“Thrity quid? With that face?”
“Yeah, don’t worry about it.”
“Okay, thirty quid, but no johnny.”
A johnny, of course, is a condom. And this is a contemporary setting. You can imagine what’s going through Kelly’s mind, but you know how desperate she is for the money. So normally, the tough-as-nails hooker would negotiate for twenty quid, but with a johnny. Self-preservation and all.
However, at this point, Kelly has come so far, and been through so much with Joanne, and tapped so deeply into whatever maternal instinct she may have (you know all you need to know about her own childhood from the look she gives when Joanne asks if she’s named the doll Wendy because that was her mother’s name).
“Forty quid and no Johnny,” she says.
It’s a wonderful bit of writing and probably the moment of Kelly’s redemption. After all her complicity in what’s happened – one of the movie’s most disturbing reveals – this is that small moment in a dramatic arc when you see clearly where the character has arrived.
That’s part of what’s so fascinating about London to Brighton. Both Derek and Kelly are complicit in what happens to Joanne. They’re morally reprehensible people, but both pitiable. It’s easy to have sympathy for Kelly as you see her and Joanne bonding, but it’s nearly miraculous that Johnny Harris’ performance as Derek evokes so much sympathy, even as he’s leading these two girls to their own murder (it helps that he looks like Eddie Marsan, a wonderful English actor who’s a natural with roles like this). When Derek holds out his hand to Kelly to show her it’s shaking because he’s angry, it’s such a transparent comment. His hand is shaking because he’s scared. He’s confused and dim and not brave enough to think about what’s right. He’s villainous because he’s weak. He’s the classic small time thug, a victim of circumstance, and the perfect foil to Kelly, with a measure of charm in his clear eyes instead of Kelly’s sexuality behind her bruised face. The scene in which Derek and Kelly “negotiate” with Joanne while she eats ice cream is probably my favorite in the movie for how well it triangulates these three characters in relation to each other.
And then there’s Georgia Groome as Joanne, who’s pretty unassuming through most of the movie. But, good lord, does she manage to make the final scene hit hard. Seeing a kid that age (she was fourteen when the movie was finished) in such anguish is really hard to watch, and she commits completely. On the DVD, there’s footage of her audition. She does a bit of the scene and it’s okay, but then she tries it a second time. Before the second attempt, she closes her eyes and goes totally still for a moment. I’m not sure I want to know where a fourteen-year-old girl goes at that point so that she can come out and do what she does in the second half of the audition. Which is nothing compared to the final scene in the back seat of the Jeep. That scene is so difficult to watch the first time you see the movie. It’s not much easier the second time.
Also, smoking in movies is usually such a peripheral thing. But I loved the way this movie established cigarettes as a way people interact. They smoke each other’s cigarettes, they give each other cigarettes, they have a smoke together, they take the pack because they don’t have any, they take a cigarette and tuck it behind an ear. It’s a great naturalistic touch, but I love how it all comes to a head when we find out why Stuart, the avenging gangster, doesn’t smoke. Which ties into his story about his father, which leads to the final reveal: that he just sat there and watched his father bleed to death. Like all the best stories, isn’t that what it all comes down to? Fatherhood. Motherhood*. What we’ve become by our parents. And for such a bleak movie whose final point is that it’s too late for Kelly, for Derek, and for Stuart, it’s not too late for Joanne, restored to her grandmother’s house after all.
-Tom
- That’s no typo in the thread’s subject line.