Key points:
- This London-set anecdote about a harsh sleeper looking for his lost canine is benevolent yet feels implausible.
Actually no, not the arrival of Sacha Baron Cohen’s over the top Austrian style journalist. This Bruno – less the umlaut – is a delightful earthy coloured vizsla, the canine sidekick of a harsh sleeper in Karl Golden’s London-set show. It’s a good-natured take a gander at vagrancy if a piece of drama ish on occasion, and maybe not completely true with regards to the difficulties of getting off the roads.
Diarmaid Murtagh plays Irishman Daniel who’s been smashing in a vacant lockup almost a rail line in Hackney with his canine Bruno. Brilliant pushes the camera straight up near Daniel’s face as he slogs the roads, intensifying the clamour of shrieking trains and thundering traffic; we feel his feelings of anxiety. Murtagh pleasantly underplays it: head down, staying away from the eye to eye connection, secured against the world. There’s a fantastic scene where he chances upon somebody from his previous lifestyle, a previous associate. A wave of disgrace disregards his face as the person professes not to see his disgusting garments.
Daniel is especially attracted to a kids’ jungle gym, which has an association with his past. It’s here that he’s assaulted by a pack of young people; raced to A&E he neglects to focus on Bruno. The following evening, back at the jungle gym searching for his canine, Daniel rather finds a seven-year-old kid, Izzy (Woody Norman), who has fled from home. Here the plot takes a constrained reel. Rather than walking the child directly to a police headquarters, Daniel permits himself to become friends with Izzy and the pair look for Bruno. Not so much as disclosure about misfortune in Daniel’s past appropriately clarifies for what reason he’d face the challenge of being found meandering the roads with a missing youngster.
