No More Wings

No More Wings is a well constructed short, small enough in scope that every movement matters. Not just power in the downbeat but repositioning in the upstroke.

Two friends meet in Morley's "six wings and chips twice", a haunt from days gone, not just hinted but (a)synchronous. Isaac and Jude have been and are here before, lemon wipes and pepper packets and all. The grind has separated them, fatherhood, finance, cans and cabs. In their friendship a perhaps reductive view of London, of the opportunities afforded to the BAME community in the mausoleum of Empire.

There's modernity, minor details in the presence of phones, silences, opportunities for reflection. Tape on the mirror at the table, blurred menus on the walls, three kinds of mayonnaise and wood-pattern formica whose texture is palpable. That mixture of sweats and plastic, chicken-fried heat through bread-stained cardboard into thin-polythene bags, the city twitch of schoolboy palms and the drumstick drumming of finger-lickin' locals. The process of gentrification is not yet complete, nor these two in their passage through it.

Morley's is a real chicken shop, so allusions to chains forged in life may not be entirely deliberate. It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine how much those 12 wings, unspecified chips (suspicion is six), two drinks cost, but it's not about the bread but the breaking thereof.

Is more said than left unsaid? The version provided to Eye For Film was subtitled, but one suspects it's for much the same reason that Trainspotting was. What's Kent here is actual county, but the argot is sufficiently rich that even an ultracrepidarian like myself needed help with Ps and Qs.

A directorial debut for Abraham Adeyemi, this is the third short he's scripted. With some variety in subject matter across them, No More Wings shows a flexibility with tone in script that's carried over to other duties behind the camera. Olan Collardy's camerawork is crisp, crisply catching the central duo (and their chronological doubles) among the potentially harsh tiles and fluorescents of high street fast food.

Ivanno Jeremiah will be familiar to you if you've seen The Flood, and Parys Jordan may have fewer credits but more than holds his own. As Isaac and Jude they are joined in the act of acting by Joshua Cameron and Tyrus McKenzie respectively. The realities of short production are such that they will not have had the time to develop the roles together afforded to, say, George MacKay and Orlando Scwerdt as Ned Kelly in The True History... but there's still a continuity between them, things passed and past. Literally so, in fact, in that set of moments and minor details to watch for.

Despite the span of years it covers in its few minutes, No More Wings is never rushed, doing enough with a smooth economy as to be unflappable.