Under the Mud Sol Papadopoulos UK 2007
Location really works for Under the Mud, a community driven drama-comedy from Liverpool. Set in Garston, an impoverished suburb of south Liverpool, Under the Mud follows the Holy Communion of a girl from a local family and the subsequent party where the adults bicker over their relationships and the kids all have various adventures of their own that key nicely into the ages of the characters - the teenage daughter agonises over a pregnancy scare; the pre-pubescent son goes joy riding etc - the unique way the script was created is at play here.
Part of the reason Under the Mud feels so right is because it was created as part of a community drama project between a group of young people and the film’s production company Hurricane Films. Comparisons with Shameless will be inevitable but given the long script process that Under the Mud came out of (several years), both projects were probably conceived separately at about the same time. It’s more pertinent to ask why two very different projects covering similar ground (Northern, sink estate bound families with very strong bonds) might have both came out of the mid 2000s. Mischief Night the 2006 Leeds based film by Penny Woolcock should also be mentioned here for its similarities of kids running amok.
It’s even more interesting to compare the imagery of these two depictions of Northern working class England: Under the Mud stands out a mile in its visual lyricism. Just as the Scouse accent can seem to have a sing-song quality to it that may have something to do with its roots in the Irish immigration to Liverpool, so too does the film have a visual quality, a little in common with the work of Terence Davies. Wondrous visions occasionally leap out of this often rather grim working class world just as they do, say, in Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives. Olivia, the girl whose Holy Communion it is, spends the film bedecked in a pair of angel’s wings and as she later speeds around nocturnal south Liverpool with her younger brother the occasional unforgettable image crops up effortlessly and rather inevitably. It’s a nice addition to the sense of family here that however bad things may become there’ll always be someone there for you. Equally however drab these characters lives may look in their bleak Garston houses at any moment something fantastic may burst into sight. It’s all there.
So whether it’s a fairy tale steeped in reality or a dour reality that aspires to fantasy, Under the Mud brings a rarely seen part of the UK to vivid life, mainly because the people who actually live where it’s set were deeply involved with the production. It’s admittedly at times lightweight children’s daydreaming but where else does this kind of vision of Northern Britain get shown in our national cinema? One reason perhaps why many of the UK’s more successful films in the last decade have been about successful white middle class Londoners might have something to do with the successful white middle class Londoners who make them. What about the rest of the country? Under the Mud provides one solution to finding out.
