Finisterre

Directors: Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans

The film: Given its subtitle, A Film about London, it's not a fantasy world of daunting monuments and tawdry fridge magnets that drives Finisterre. Instead, Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans attempt to convey the pull of the city as experienced by those trapped in suburban lives, the beauty and danger that lurk within the most banal details of London's urban sprawl - 'to create an enthusiasm for the neglected or undervalued', as veteran thespian Michael Jayston pronounces in the narration.

This means a journey from leafy heaths to greasy spoon cafes, and from the bustling streets of the city to the menacing alleyways in crumbling housing estates. Finisterre is designed to symbolise a day across London for someone from Croydon - an exemplary out-there suburb, as it has no underground connection with the city itself.

The trip, in the form of snapshots of diversified views of the urban landscape, takes in landmarks that symbolise London's appeal for starry-eyed youths: the recording studios and vinyl pressing plants that make or break the dreams of wannabes; the mass of cranes that perennially remakes the city; performance spaces such as Water Rats that unleash many a 'teenage rebellion'.

Voices of long-time Londoners relate how the city altered their mindsets, from punk chronicler Mark Perry to Britart enfant terrible Julian Opie, folk chanteuse Vashti Bunyan and rocker-turned-postman Vic Goddard. Apart from shots of the 'cool kids of death' - youngsters festering in rundown housing estates with their 'hoods up, heads down' - faces are conspicuous only by their absence.

For it's London that is central to Finisterre, which means 'the end of the world' in French. The film examines, as the narration announces, 'the impact of the environment on the quality of the living', by surveying a city which is partly bustling metropolis and partly urban waste and. It's by turns a scathing indictment of the dehumanising patterns of urban life - city workers marching across Blackfriars Bridge to their offices, or the army of umbrellas that fill the streets as the working day fades - and also a moving depiction of a city vibrant with graffiti and nightlife.

The extras: For those who arrive at Finisterre via Saint Etienne - and intend to see the film as just an accompaniment to the group's music - the extras hold the Holy Grail. Fragments of the film are rearranged to become Saint Etienne music videos, the coherence and power of the film itself losing out somewhat.

Commentaries from the filmmakers and the band are useful in explaining the movie, but the booklet the gem. Essays by sociologist Michael Bracewell, London mayor Ken Livingstone, and Sukhdev Sandhu, a London-born English professor at New York University and author of London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City, provide cutting perspectives that the film itself might have failed to evoke.

The verdict: An admirable attempt at chronicling the diverse visions that form London, an 'eternal magnet attracting our dreams'.