Shot on Super 16 film stock for practically nothing, SA Halewood’s debut feature is subtitled A Russian’s Guide to Ripping Off London. Based on Pavel Tetersky and Sergei Sakin’s cult travelogue, it’s the story of two young self-confessed "pieces of Russian scum" who hook up with an oligarch’s shady son to exploit the British system for all it is worth.
You don’t know whether to laugh or cry as they forge work permits, steal mobile phones, filch from stores and smoke first dope and then crack. You laugh because Ben Barnes (The Chronicles of Narnia) and Andrei Chadov (a star in Russia) have enough charm to get away with being indolent rascals. On the whole, the dreadful people they meet deserve their lot.
Halewood’s triumph is that he looks at interracial London and its immigrant population with an ironic eye that doesn’t preclude sympathy.
This is a microcosm of society where everyone is trying to turn a pound or two in trying circumstances. We encounter a landlord who puts them up in a smelly room in a high-rise block, a corner shopkeeper who tells them to steal from supermarkets rather than him, and officials who pounce when they can.
Bigga Than Ben is small-scale, episodic and not without its sins of omission. But it looks as if it speaks the truth and is considerably more entertaining and thought-provoking than most of the week’s other offerings.
Bigga Than Ben: The Russians' Guide To Ripping Off London
Cert: 15
