There's nothing new about product placement in the cinema, but Shane Meadows's 'Somers Town' is fully funded by Eurostar, which it depicts in fluffy soft-focus - a trend that would be much easier to condemn if the film wasn't so good, writes Mary Andrews
JUDGED ON face value, Shane Meadows's new film is honest, earthy and affecting. Two lonesome teenagers - one British, one Polish - befriend each other on the streets of London. They hang out, get drunk and lope off in doe-eyed pursuit of a foxy French waitress. Half an hour in, the Polish dad has an announcement to make. "Today, I went on a fast train through the tunnel, under the sea," he says. "It only takes a couple of hours either way. Not bad, eh?"
Under normal circumstances this remark would sail by unnoticed, but these are not normal circumstances. When one realises that Meadows's movie is entirely funded by Eurostar, the rail company that runs trains between the UK and mainland Europe, it's hard not to hear the line as a sales pitch - a word from our sponsor. The question is, does it undermine the integrity of the film as a whole? Is Somers Town a pure-blood Meadows work in the vein of, say, Dead Man's Shoes, or the searing This Is England? Or is it, as the film's Wikipedia entry already has it, "a covert advertising campaign"? Somers Town was released this month, but even before then Meadows had heard the rumblings. "I know there are people out there going, 'Oh, it's all a big con'," he says. "That's insulting to me, because I'm proud to have Somers Town in my family of work. If no one knew Eurostar had funded it, they wouldn't give it a second thought."
Initially conceived as a nine-minute "legacy project" to commemorate the opening of the company's high-speed rail link to St Pancras, Somers Town swiftly snowballed. In the space of 10 days Meadows had shot so much footage he decided the short should become a feature. It went on to win awards at the Berlin and Edinburgh film festivals, hailed as a resounding triumph for all concerned.
Talk to the men behind Somers Town and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they agree with Meadows: the film is a drama, not an advertisement. The only stipulations imposed were that the film be set in Somers Town, and that it contain no "gratuitous" sex or violence. Aside from that, the director could do what he liked, enjoying complete creative control of a reported £500,000 (about €628,000) budget.
"Basically we said to Shane, 'Whatever you think it is, it is'," says Greg Nugent, Eurostar's marketing director. "This was Shane's project. We had no idea what was coming out, so there was a real danger of us ending up with something we couldn't use. That was a massive risk for us."
It's safe to say the company is rather pleased with the way things panned out: instead of a short promo to put on their website, or screen on the train, they got a prize-winning drama with an infinite shelf life. "This," agrees Nugent, "is not how it was meant to be."
Is there a precedent here? Product placement is almost as old as cinema itself. Brandchannel.com reports that there are 15 "featured brands" in The Dark Knight and a whopping 95 in Sex and the City. The likes of The Island and I, Robot have faced criticism for allegedly subjugating the plot to the plugs. Run, Fat Boy, Run (in which Simon Pegg runs the fictitious "Nike River Run") was dismissed by one critic as "one enormous ad for Nike".
But it's hard to say how much money changes hands in these deals: product placement at the cinema remains entirely unregulated, both in the US and in the foreign markets that screen its films. In the UK, advertising agencies that work with film-makers are answerable to no one - not to the communications industry regulator, Ofcom, or the British Board of Film Classification. The numbers are presumably buried deep in the studio accounts.
If nothing else, Somers Town deserves points for transparency. Meadows's film is not a ragbag of product placement, but something else entirely - a tough, tender film that was nonetheless bought and paid for by one major company. It is an in-house production with one foot in the heyday of the official British Rail film and the other in a new era of corporate sponsorship and "associative marketing".
Barnaby Spurrier, the film's producer, prefers to frame it in terms of artistic patronage. Eurostar might just have easily commissioned an artwork by artists Tracey Emin, or Gilbert and George. Instead they took a punt on a picture by Meadows. "I do understand the suspicions, but I wish people would not prejudge," Spurrier says. "It's so difficult to get British films made that any form of new finance deserves to be explored. The fact is that Shane made this under the exact same auspices as he'd make any film."
SO WHAT'S IN it for Eurostar? Spurrier explains that they own the print and will get the revenue - assuming, as now seems likely, the film turns a profit. Nugent goes a step further, admitting that Eurostar has already benefited from its association with The Da Vinci Code, which it helped promote courtesy of a multi-million dollar deal with Columbia Pictures. Film, he says, makes a particular impact. "If people are seeing the benefits to St Pancras and the regeneration we've been involved in, then that obviously helps our reputation. If that makes them more likely to go on a Eurostar train, then that's good as well."
Over at Campaign magazine, deputy editor Francesca Fisher compares Somers Town to "those traditional Coca-Cola ads featuring the song I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing. They gave you a nice feeling inside, but it was pretty intangible stuff. This film has the same effect. You come away thinking 'nice old Eurostar', and maybe that steers you towards buying a £150 train ticket."
Released last month, Olivier Assayas's acclaimed Summer Hours, starring Juliette Binoche, spun out of a commission from the Musée D'Orsay. Now here's Somers Town. Fisher spots a trend here - a new avenue of finance for film-makers; a new media channel for advertisers. Even so, she assures me, it arrives with an in-built safety mechanism. "The moment it's done badly it will be a disaster. If people sit down to watch a damn good film, then fair enough. But if they pay to watch some grossly overt propaganda then they'll feel cheated and will end up resenting the brand - and it will probably never happen again."
All this would be so easy if Somers Town sucked. It would be even simpler if this was a slick and cynical product in the I, Robot mould. But Meadows's film is neither. Scripted by Paul Fraser, the director's longtime collaborator, it's a soulful social-realist drama that keeps the plugs to a minimum and revolves around a London that is resolutely unglamourised. For 90 per cent of its run, Somers Town is beyond reproach. It's just the other 10 per cent that set my alarm bells ringing. In its final moments, at least one major character gets to spend a weekend in Paris. Hitherto shot in black-and-white, the film abruptly explodes into luminous colour, like Dorothy visiting Oz. There are pavement artists and carousel rides. Lovers kiss outside the Sacré-Coeur and a boy waves his Eurostar ticket up to the camera.
So here is the charge I put to Meadows. If a film is funded by Eurostar, and it shows Eurostar in a positive light then it is, by definition, an advert for Eurostar. "Well, if you want to define it that way, I've not got a clever argument to oppose it," he replies. "But I never once thought about Eurostar when I was making this film. I'm not selling my soul to the devil here."
Meadows has made commercials in the past, of course. He has shot ads for McDonald's, Quorn, Barclaycard and Natwest bank. In this regard, he's hardly unusual. Even Ken Loach made a McDonald's advert, back in 1990, long before he contributed to the McLibel documentary. Meadows has never tried to distance himself from his corporate gigs. Somers Town, he says, was nothing like that. The film's only crime, he argues, is that it "tinkers with the Holy Bible of how films are made here".
Meadows has spent his life finding unorthodox, wing-and-a-prayer ways of transferring his visions to the screen: Somers Town, in his view, is another way of achieving that end. And so long as it's done right, he hopes other directors might follow his lead.
"This is my first film in London," he points out, "the first that proves I can move away from my community . It's also the first film where I've worked with actors in a foreign language. It's a film that's made me want to go to eastern Europe. It's a film that's started me on a whole new path."
As it happens, I took a lot of positives from Somers Town too. It is a deeply moving, sharply acted, beautifully structured piece of work; a worthy addition to the director's body of work. And, as with Meadows, it's a film that made me want to travel, to go abroad; if not to eastern Europe then maybe to Paris, and maybe by train, a fast train under the Channel. Curse those nice feelings, that intangible stuff. Sometimes it's the most powerful stuff there is. -Guardian service
Somers Town is on release