a sea of superb performances

Film Under The Mud is a rather good low budget comedy drama filmed in and around the Garston and Speke areas of Liverpool. It’s a little girl’s holy communion day but the rest of her family have their own preoccupations. Her mum and dad are having marital problems, her big sister Paula’s boyfriend is heading off to Spain without telling her and her older brother lacks a sense of direction. Plus there’s Magic, our narrator, who’s nearly been adopted by this “family from hell” (as the publicity would have it) after the death of his mother and is besotted with Paula but just can’t seem to work out how to get her to notice him.

Shot on digital video and written over a three year period in conjunction with young writers, the film should have the whiff of a community project, but nothing could be further from the truth. Directed with flare by Sol Papadopoulos (who was also a producer on Terrance Davies’s transcendental Of Time and the City), the film wins through a combination of razor sharp comic timing from the cast and a willingness to give the same kind of magical realism Steve Martin layered on his home town in LA Story. There are scenes around Liverpool airport that are simultaneously hilarious and visually quite, quite beautiful stretching the film out from the initially fairly televisual and Hollyoaks-like, into the truly cinematic.

The emotional core of the film is provided by local theatre and tv veteran Andrew Schofield playing the father figure whose so wrapped up in guilt over the jailing of the gangsterish best friend (whose released as the film opens) that his relationship with the children’s mother is failing. But this is a collection of superb performances, even from the very young kids who are able to carry whole scenes by themselves, a very rare quality. My favourite storyline is Magic’s fight to get noticed by Paula and her dawning recognition that there’s more to men than their ability to play records. Oh and she spends most of the film talking to her imaginary friend (who everyone else also pretends is real just to humour her).

That kind of quirky humour is just one of the things that warms me to Under The Mud. Another is that there’s something quite extraordinary about seeing the place you were raised so vividly brought to screen, absolutely catching the atmosphere of the place and its people but without resorting to layering in artificial grittiness or stereotyping. I imagine my experience of watching this was much the same as the population of Austin Texas seeing Richard Linklater’s Slacker or New Jersey watching Kevin Smith’s Clerks, the amazement that anyone would want to make a film here and that it would turn out so good. I don’t imagine I’ll see a car chase around the retail park or emotional devastation playing out inside The Krazy House again any time soon.