What finer way to nudge us gently towards the forthcoming festivities and celebrate the season of goodwill than by creating a lurid reconstruction of the riots that scorched through London last summer. London's Burning was assembled principally from news footage of the events, which you'll recall was copious and shockingly vivid, while interspersing it with dramatic re-enactments of people's real-life experiences in Clapham. Quite what it was trying to tell us I'm not sure.
One item not on screenwriter Mark Hayhurst's agenda was trying to explain the motivations of the rioters, who were presented like some sort of incomprehensible alien invasion. The closest thing to an analysis came from a woman having her hair done in Onelia and Enzo's Ocean Hair Salon, who wondered if "maybe we owe them something" (yeah, a huge pile of iPads and widescreen TVs) and argued that bankers are robbers too, even though they don't smash up people's property. Maybe she added a few layers of nuance to her opinion after the mob came and wrecked the salon later that evening. (Top cops David Morrissey and Samantha Bond try not to panic, pictured below)
Masked and hooded, the rioters were anonymous and rarely spoke, and their aims remained wholly mysterious. However, when one character (a policeman) made a reference to "the usual suspects", he was swiftly shot down for daring to imply that the rioters might be black youths. In case we hadn't got the message, the first person we saw chucking a brick at a shop window was a sneering white girl, while one of the few looters picked out for inspection was a woman dressed like a lawyer.
Rioting takes all sorts, it seems, and the police (according to the film's fictional Community Policeman, an ineffectual busybody called Trevor) weren't allowed to use tear gas in case some of their targets were asthma sufferers. The riots were beginning to look like a supervised community youth activity, where the police stood back and watched and made sure that none of the participants hurt themselves. Citizens wanting their property protected should fill in a form and come back next week. The only person we saw getting a battering from the riot police was Alex, who worked with his dad in Clapham's Dub Vendor reggae record shop. He heroically went into the next door shop, Party Superstore, to fight the fire lit by an arsonist, and got clobbered by the baton-wielding Bill when he came out. (You weren't dressed for looting without a smartphone, pictured below)
The recent Guardian/LSE study, Reading the Riots, concluded that loathing of the police was a major stimulus for the violence. But if the participants were looking for revenge on the rozzers, they must have been disappointed when so few (or for long periods, none) of them showed up on the London streets. Then again, when Sky News interviewed some masked rioters after the fact, they said they were protesting against cuts to the education maintenance allowance, so maybe it depends who you ask and what you ask them.
Certainly the police didn't emerge well from London's Burning, as they hadn't in real life. Samantha Bond and David Morrissey played anonymous "senior police officers" (we were able to glean that Morrissey was the Borough Commander and his christian name was Jerry), but all they'd been given to do was bite their lips and look tense as the situation spun out of control. Their increasingly desperate pleas for reinforcements were answered too late.
And the outcome was... opaque. London's Burning didn't make any points not already covered by the news media, and its reconstructed scenes jarred awkwardly against the reality footage. Whatever your opinions of the police, the rioters, the Broken Society or the price of a pair of trainers, this film won't have changed them.
Add comment