PICTURED: Juliet Oldfield, Theo Barklem-Biggs and Phil Davis participate in a post-screening Q and A at UK Cinema Showcase.
The London Microwave scheme gives young British filmmakers the opportunity to make debut features on a modest budget of up to £120,000 with mentoring from industry professionals and participation from name actors. With a 100% success rate of shepherding the end product to distribution, its beneficiaries include Eran Creevy (SHIFTY) and Ben Drew (iLL MANORS). The latest project due for release in the UK on 16 August is BORROWED TIME, the debut feature of Jules Bishop. Filmed in Newham, East London, it stars Phil Davis (HIGH HOPES, TV’S SHERLOCK) as Philip, a retired teacher with a love of taxidermy who is the target of local kids. His house, with its overgrown foliage is seen as a means by which sixteen year-old Kevin (Theo Barklem-Biggs) can pay a debt of £535 to a local drug dealer, ‘ninja’ Nigel (Warren Brown) after a drug deal went south. Kevin just wants to get his grandma’s clock out of hock – it sits in the front window of a pawn shop. He has upset his older sister. He is laughed off as an idiot by local kids. Yet, strangely, he has his own flat. (His parents are long dead.)
BORROWED TIME charts the unlikely friendship that grows between the house-bound Philip, who has a chair lift but lacks a mobility scooter and Kevin, who initially tries to rob him but ends up giving him a family. Philip gives Kevin a sense of his own courage, the ability to act when he realises the truth about the source of his debt.
Unusually in the age of digital, BORROWED TIME is shot on film, a throwback to old British cinema; it nicely complements the stuffed animals that populate Philip’s flat. It is fundamentally a study of two men on the autistic spectrum. Philip frequently says things three times, when he isn’t quoting Clint Eastwood, and Kevin lacks common sense. He cannot read people and gets on better with his four year-old nephew than he does with his peers. (When his nephew does not want to finish his dinner, the grateful undernourished Kevin in his blue hoodie does so for him.) It is notable that Kevin only appears to have one set of clothes, but then his flat is being staked out.
Watching two characters on the spectrum does make for uncomfortable viewing. This isn’t about social inequality, rather mental health. There is a big theme of care in the community that pervades the movie but is not discussed. A bit more knowingness (on the part of Bishop) would not have gone amiss.
Davis was name-checked as an inspiration by Daniel Day Lewis after the latter accepted his third Best Actor Oscar (as Lincoln) but gives a modest, grumpy performance; it isn’t transformative stuff. Barklem-Biggs recalls a young Nicholas Lyndhurst (one of the stars of the TV sitcom ONLY FOOLS AND HORSES); he could be Rodney, if ever the show is remade.
‘Ninja’ Nigel is not a serious criminal, so the film has less of a harder edge than you might expect. BORROWED TIME suffers from a lack of ambition. It put me in mind of THE OPTIMISTS OF NINE ELMS (1973), in which children befriend an old busker played by Peter Sellers. Nothing really new, then; one hopes that the next Microwave London film will be more thematically and formally daring. Nothing truly tasty came out of a microwave and that appears to be true of this movie.
Screened at UK Cinema Showcase, Vue Screen One, Piccadilly Circus, Sunday 14 July 2013
