Englishmen behaving badly

In the somewhat simple Wondrous Oblivion, we are taken to working-class London in the early Sixties and left on a street housing cockneys, German-Jewish immigrants and a family of new Caribbean arrivals.

Young David Wiseman (Sam Smith) lives with his kind mother (Emily Woof, terrific as usual) and dour tailor father (Stanley Townsend) in one of these houses, attending a local posh school (on a scholarship, presumably) that reveres cricket.

Sam is keen to make the junior First XI, but is a dreamer on the pitch, his pockets full of playing cards, his imagination bouncing woozily off the sound of leather on willow.

But when cricket enthusiast Dennis (Delory Lindo, charismatic, conflicted) moves next door from Jamaica, Sam gets the masterclasses he craves: Lindo is a male Julie Walters to Wiseman's Billy Elliot.

The film earnestly shows through the bad behaviour of various neighbours, how England was not much of a place of welcome to new faces, and that this was particularly hard for the Caribbean diaspora because it was the very country they had called Mother.

The Barbadian writer and activist George Lamming once noted: "England made us pupils to its language and institutions, baptised us in the same religion, schooled boys in the same game of cricket, with its elaborate and meticulous etiquette of rivalry. And yet the English looked on us as strangers."

This competitive atmosphere of unease moves the film along, but it is full of forebodings that it does not follow through. Something for socially alert, gentle 12-yearolds.

Wondrous Oblivion
Cert: certPG