Institute History
Description
With approximately twenty-five shorts to his name and a stellar first feature, TwentyFourSeven (Sundance ‘08), Shane Meadows is without question one of Britain’s most prodigious (and prolific) young directors. In his latest film, A Room for Romeo Brass, Meadows captures the joys and anguish of adolescence with the same marvelous medley of pathos and humor that characterizes his earlier work. Probing what has become a staple milieu in contemporary British cinema, Meadows returns to the working-class suburbs of his native Nottingham, where two young boys survive heartache to forge a friendship with lasting implications.
A motley pair, Romeo and Gavin have been best mates longer than they can remember. Tough but incredibly charismatic, the roly-poly Romeo can be as brutish as he is sweet. Conversely, his little friend Gavin is timid and retiring, crippled by a back problem that causes him to limp. Though their lives are rife with hardships and familial dysfunction, the boys always manage to share a laugh and scrabble together a sense of fun. Then one day an older stranger rescues them from a street scuffle and, in a relationship that invites disaster, begins to wedge the lifelong friends apart.
A film about survival, loyalty, and love, A Room for Romeo Brass is excruciatingly tender and, at its four-letter heart, incredibly sweet. A director with an uncanny ability to encompass both the endearing and bleak, the innocent and contemptible, Shane Meadows again proves himself a revelation: profane, profound, and wondrously sensitive to humanity’s foibles and riches.