Lava

Born as a black comedy possibly responding to the one-sided and clean portrait of London shown in Notting Hill, Lava sets itself to give a different image of West London while exploiting some of the clichéd features of gangster films.

The initial fragmented editing crosscuts between the protagonists, two of which, Smiggy and Philip, are our comic and clumsy antiheroes looking for revenge against the man who caused Philip’s brother’s brain-death.

The film emphasizes the genre’s classical fascination with guns and finds in Julie the anti-femme fatale character who contributes to the film’s irony and mockery.

As for the setting, the chaos of Notting Hill Carnival functions as background to create a pace for what is happening inside the various rooms and houses.

On the downside, the characters lack depth and proper characterization and the various murders become bad jokes to laugh at while being mostly useless to the narrative development.

Lava, though, succeeds in playing with conventions through the use of montage and cinematography, often using cliché shots to overturn the scene’s tone. Two especially well done sequences include direct references to Taxi Driver, from the most used line of dialogue of all “Are you talking to me?” to a recreation of the film’s high-angle sequence showing all the blood that has been shed in the rooms.

Finally, Lava succeeds in portraying a less romanticized and clichéd London to instead show a city with which we can identify, a London made of ups and downs and a very distinct humour.