Watch London River For Free

Please don't spend money on this.

Just what I expected

Brilliant and touching

An Exercise In Nonsense

The tenth anniversary of the 7 July bombings has led to a flurry of programming including the somewhat disappointing and emotionally manipulative A Song for Jenny shown on BBC television.Rachid Bouchareb who made the award winning Days of Glory has made this curious low budget film just a few years after the atrocities which is a mixture of English, French and Arabic.Elisabeth (Brenda Blethyn) is a hard working farmer in Guernsey. After the July bombings she tries to contact her daughter who lives in London but she does not return her calls. Worried she makes her way to London and finds out that she is living in a flat in a predominantly Arab area.Ousmane (Sotigui Kouyate) is an African Muslim working in a forest in France. He has come to London to look for his son who his family back in Africa cannot contact. Ousmane knows little about his son had he had to leave his family behind to work in France. At one point we discover that he believes that his son might had been one of the perpetrators of the London bombings.Ousmane sees a photo of Elisabeth's daughter and realises that he has a picture of her and his son together and contacts her. Elisabeth is wary and distrustful of Ousmane and calls the police. It looks like the son and daughter were living together and her daughter was also learning Arabic. Elisabeth could not understand why she would be learning Arabic,hanging with a black African boy and living in a French-Arab area of London. Its all confusing to her.Eventually Elisabeth realises that they are both on the same quest and team up together to look for their respective children. It seems that there is hope that their children are alive and went abroad on the day of the bombings.Sotigui Kouyate gives Ousmane a quiet dignity, the actor was frail when he made the film but looks imposing with his big presence and dreadlocks. Brenda Blethyn specialises in playing frumps these days and here she very much hits the mark as someone who has grown in an environment a world away from multiculturalism of London.When she comes to London she is confused especially as she tries to fathom how her daughter ended up in such an alien environment and felt comfortable with it.The fact she comes from Guernsey helps get over the language barrier as she can communicate with Ousmane in French. Francis Magee plays a police inspector who speaks French in a bizarre Irish/Manx accent.You always suspect that the film will inflict a sucker punch to the duo. It is just a shame that it took place in such a poor setting of some basement corridor full of pipes that was supposedly a police station.It is a slow burning and thoughtful piece of two people looking for a glimmer of amongst despair and then dealing with their despair. Its simple premise is a big plus as you get pulled in with their search for their loved ones.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS Apart from genres that I don't much care for such as musicals and westerns (John Ford excepted) I don't really have any taboos about what I watch. I generally close my eyes when anyone is about to slash their wrists but that's a matter of personal squeamishness rather than taboo. Provided it has quality, I generally lap up the rest of the film, blood and all. There is however one type of film that I find suspect to the point of avoidance and that is the dramatised account of tragedies and disasters that are so near in time that it casts the viewer into the role of voyeur of people still experiencing tremendous personal grief. Films on 9/11 certainly fall into this category. My sole reason for watching "London River" which deals with the 2005 London terrorist attacks was to catch a performance by Brenda Blethyn, a British actress for whom I have a tremendous admiration. I can only say that my cinema going experience would have been that much the poorer, had I not made this decision, such is the power, sincerity and integrity of this highly charged work. Although the horrendous events of 7/7 are an integral part of the film, it touches on so much more in its presentation of two disparate characters drawn together in a common quest, she a farming widow living on Guernsey, he an African forestry worker from France. In the ordinary way their only remote point of contact, apart from language, would be their proximity to the land, but 7/7 has drawn them to a neighbourhood of North London in their anxiety to discover what might have happened to their children on that terrible day. Even before they meet we are made aware of the woman's deep seated mistrust of other cultures and everything Islamic in particular. Her unease and expressions of bigotry only intensify the more she comes to realise that her daughter may have been cohabiting with a Muslim. Ultimately it is the subtle way that a common tragedy can enable a dignified respect by two people for one another to come about that gives the last half hour of "London River" its tremendous poignancy. The farewell between cinema's possibly most unlikely couple is something very precious and unforgettable

Hmm, I was in London on 7.7.05. I was trying to get down the road where the bus was blown up. Does this film cause me to recall how I felt that day, what I saw that day? No. Sorry folks, this is a very thin treatment of a landmark event in London's history. It annoyed me to the same extent that it consciously tried to pull at my heart strings. That's too much. I hate being manipulated like that. I'm being generous not damning this film because the two principal actors give good enough portrayals of the characters despite the poor standard of writing in the script. One of them was constantly reminding me of Giacommetti sculptures - a distraction from the criminal bloopers that had not been cut; e.g. a post September 2007 car registration number clearly visible centre screen for several long seconds. There is no story arc worth mentioning. You know how it's going to end and quite frankly, it's hard to care other than feeling moved by the loss of life. A missed opportunity for something much better.

Weeks after the terrorist attacks in London a mother calls her daughter, over and over again. She hasn't heard from her in a while and is getting more and more anxious about her, knowing she lived close to where the events took place. When she goes to London to find her she finds a man instead. A man who matches her in one important manner - he is searching for his son. The two of them continue their search together and slowly find out more about themselves and each other.Dark and dreary, depressing and painful. Sometimes people get together for entirely the wrong reason and this is one of these occasions. They connect rather well and play their stories out in a believable way. As they go through their daily routine it becomes all too painfully clear where it will all end - but the real pain of this film is that it ends too quickly. It runs for 87 minutes and could have used another 15 without having grown less intense. The shortness makes it feel a little rushed, but only a little.9 out of 10 steps in the dark