TWENTYFOURSEVEN
TWENTYFOURSEVEN
Ticket sales start on 22 October at 2 PM.
Shane Meadows’ feature debut already contains many of the qualities that would come to define his cinema. Shot in black and white, the film could easily have felt like an affected artistic exercise. Instead, its visual style is inseparable from its characters, capturing both the monotony and the bleakness of a world where hope is in short supply. Humour and aggression sit side by side throughout.
In a typical English working-class town, young people have little to do beyond drifting into addiction and forming their own “brotherhoods”. Alan Darcy (Bob Hoskins), who once found himself in a similar position, offers them another way. He opens a boxing gym where they can train regularly, escape a world shaped by violence and begin to form a new kind of family. He takes this ragtag group of boys on a bonding trip to Wales and, over time, they become a team rather than a collection of outsiders. Their participation in a professional boxing tournament becomes the story’s climax and a chance to see just how far each of them has come.
Filmed in and around Nottingham, 24 7: TWENTY FOUR SEVEN captures the social consequences of the economic changes of the 1980s and early 1990s with striking accuracy. Unemployment, the erosion of local communities, frustration-fuelled domestic violence, rigid ideas of masculinity and femininity, and the complete lack of prospects for young people all form part of the landscape – hallmarks of the Thatcher era. At the 1998 BAFTA Awards, the film was nominated for the Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film, while Meadows received the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1997 Venice Film Festival. It is a fine example of 1990s British social-realist cinema, but above all a story about sport as a source of discipline, belonging and an alternative to the senseless violence surrounding these young men.
It is also the story of one man trying to give a younger generation what he never had himself: the hope that life can be different. Darcy wants them to believe they can become more than products of their environment and their time, and that where they were born or how they grew up does not have to determine their future. But this would not be a Shane Meadows film without its characteristic note of bitterness. The boxing ring is meant to offer a sense of control over anger and the feeling that one might still have a place in the world. In the end, though, we are only human.
Dorota Reksińska
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