Perhaps drawing inspiration from Mike Leigh's 'Naked', McMahon's intention with Southside seems to be to capture one of those multitudes of moments where the lives of two people intersect for no other reason than to comment upon each other's chosen path. Preferring the streets of London to those of Manchester after fleeing his pregnant girlfriend's somewhat irate father, Billy finds the south side no more inviting than the north. Broke, jobless and without direction, he stills has more going for him than Charley, the destitute vagrant drunk upon whom Billy stumbles behind a rundown outhouse on Clapham Common. Swapping anecdotes about how they each ended up at that spot at that exact time, much of Southside's brisk running time is devoted to a series of episodic flashbacks. And it is here that Southside's credentials lie: a montage of tightly edited vignettes which provides a showcase for some highly creative post production work.
Southside's story perhaps ties itself in too neat a knot, with both Billy and Charley having encountered the same short-tempered wide boy and his back-up crew of pubescent-era wasters. On the run from them for no more a reason than getting in their way at a cash machine, Charley was actually in hiding behind the outhouse, only for Billy to unknowingly give away his position to the chasing pack. Having been cornered by their quarry, Billy and Charley emerge armed, kicking and screaming as Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. But it isn't the story here which gains the plaudits: rather McMahon's ability to condense time in the incidental flashbacks, rendering them almost as a series of isolated low-comedy sketches.
Veering between voice-over and diagetic dialogue, it is these scenes that reveal the promise of McMahon as a filmmaker. Foregoing most conventional rules of editing, lighting and camera-work, he creates his own palette of tricks to serve his story. Over-exposure, jump-cuts, time-lapse, and gritty colour schemes are all employed to maintain the edginess of Southside's largely urban setting, while unprompted zooms, in-camera re-framing and snap focussing all serve to maintain a sense of technical momentum, and reveal McMahon as a post-production perfectionist. But while all this works to the film's benefit in the flashback scenes, I feel it was almost in danger of over-indulgence in the here-and-now scenes between Billy and Charley.
Perhaps another impressive aspect to Southside, stemming from McMahon's screenplay, was the speed with which the film draws its characters. The tempo of the film is such that the audience is forced to keep up with the events or risk missing something of value. The editing is brisk and economical to extremes, and Southside wastes not a frame in its fifteen minute duration. The opening sequence of old home video footage is possibly there as a framing device, perhaps placing the two characters' plight in context when compared to the freedom and optimism of their early 8mm lives.
But Southside's thumbnail sketch of two wandering souls down on their luck, who share more in common than they'll ever know, is tack-sharp, off-kilter edgy and engagingly bold, and showcases a calling card for McMahon's promising future.
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