by Julian Wood
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Marianne Jean-Baptiste, David Webber, Michele Austin, Tuwaine Barrett
Intro:
… memorable and real and it will stay with you long after you have been subjected to it…
To British film fans, Mike Leigh is very much a known quantity. Over a long and prolific career, he has mostly served up the same fare; intense, realistic character-driven dramas about ordinary British lives. To some, this is thin gruel with grisly bits, but others savour the taste of authenticity. This one is set in a London suburb and features an Afro-Caribbean family (and an almost entirely black British cast), but that is incidental. The focus is on the emotional complexity to be found at the heart of ‘any’ family, once you scratch the surface.
Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Curtley (David Webber) have been married for a long time. Their home is in a quiet suburb, so maybe he is doing well with his plumbing business, but their material comfort is not matched by an emotional one. Pansy’s sister Chantell (Michele Austin) is a hairdresser. She lives in a small crowded flat with her two young adult daughters, but she has something denied to Pansy: a knockabout and enjoyable atmosphere, and the warmth of functional family. Pansy does have her own garden at the back of her house, but it provides an empty vista; no flowers, a plain lawn and a small shed. Pansy is more or less afraid to go out there, imprisoned as she is by her own self-limiting horizons. When a fox sneaks in, she has another predictable meltdown.
Jean-Baptiste has worked with Leigh before on the immensely moving Secrets and Lies (1996). Here, she is once again on top form, but Pansy is much more of a challenge to make likable. In the first part of the film, she is so angry and cantankerous that the performance becomes a bit one note. We long for her to take the rough with the smooth just once but, no, her paranoia and relentless negativity always win out. She is also sometimes a bit pathetic and more than a little self-centred. Curtley does his best to accommodate her, but he can’t win, and she just doubles down on her bitterness. She gives every impression of hating him, when really, she is more or less hating herself. She seems – as William Blake once wrote – determined to make a hell in heaven’s despite. Poor old Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), her adult son, seems to be stuck in some sort of arrested development because of all this. He has shrunk into himself and unable to embrace life.
You could say that Leigh lays this on with a trowel in the relentless first three quarters of the film. We come to be as exasperated with Pansy as her family and relatives. Leigh flirts with taking it too absurd lengths when every scene ends in a flare up or an altercation. We are on the brink of feeling bathos instead of pathos. However, once he really explores the relationship between Pansy and Chantelle, we come to see things in a more rounded and forgiving way. Pansy has her reasons, even if the effect is to alienate the very people who want to love her.
As so often with Leigh’s films, one is often torn between the admiration for the purity of intent (and the great naturalistic acting), and the somewhat unrelieved quality of the telling. Leigh has never courted popularity (quite the reverse) and that has been both his strength and a drawback. This film, like all of his best work, is memorable and real and it will stay with you long after you have been subjected to it… However, you don’t have to be a happy-clappy idiot to wish for a little bit more sunshine between the clouds.
