Writer-director Shane O'Sullivan's indie feature may have been shot on Digital Betacam for £20,000, but it possesses more of the random life, mixed flavours and offbeat trades of Brick Lane and adjacent multicultures than many an expensive and pretentious London location movie. It looks surprisingly good, too.
The story is a mere wisp of passable invention, coming and going as the mood changes: Chinese Lili (Hanayo), a wishbone child sporting decals, ditsy tattoos, twin pigtails and leggings like gift-wrappings, flees an arranged marriage in Hong Kong, comes to London in search of a pop idol and finds a young Japanese detective named Go (Shigetomo Yutani) trailing her, eventually falling for her. What matters more than story is the folk she meets and the places she hangs out in overnight, protected like all promiscuous innocents abroad by her own charming dizziness.
Jamal (Nitin Ganatra), a sparky Muslim adman, offers her the lead in a tampons commercial; Bangladeshi teashop owner Ravi (Kriss Dosanjh) blesses her with bland goodwill; Jimmy (Adrian Pang), who runs a buttonhole factory, threatens to turn her in; but Saeed (Saeed Jaffrey) plays Cupid in his curry restaurant where the menu is in French ("Vindaloo Marie Antoinette - blows your head off"). Colours, rituals, the late-night melancholy of narrow streets and the muezzin calls floating in the morning air, plus a generously biased view of multicultural goodwill to allcomers, make for a gentler streetscape than reality possibly warrants. But the film's success in tuning out English influences - only a single Anglo-Saxon, I think, shows her face - is refreshingly assured and the picture of a community that's splitting vocally and behaviourly between its ancestral roots and its now-indigenous identity makes Second Generation a valuable piece of social documentation. O'Sullivan's own cinematic evolution will be one to watch.
Second Generation
Cert: cert12
