Starring: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, David Webber, Tuwaine Barrett
Distributor: Mushroom Group
Runtime: 97 mins. Reviewed in Mar 2025
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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Ongoing exploration of the contemporary world with a tragicomic study of human strengths and weaknesses.
Mike Leigh has been a significant writer-director in British cinema for many decades, creating the screenplay, getting his cast to improvise to create the dialogue. He has won many awards. He has made a great impression by dramatising British life – awards for films such as Naked, Secrets & Lies, Another Year, Vera Drake… And he also made historical dramas especially Topsy-Turvy, which chronicles the partnership of legendary musical/theatrical writers Gilbert and Sullivan, and Mr Turner, about the unconventional British painter.
This is a film from Leigh, who is in his 80s, was delayed by Covid and partly financed from Spanish sources. It is set in around London’s Trafalgar Square area, but also in homes, hairdressers, doctors’ surgeries, the dentist, supermarkets – the areas of ordinary life.
The central characters come from families originally from the Caribbean and are seen in the context of contemporary British multicultural life.
At the centre is a middle-aged woman, Pansy, an extraordinary performance from Jean-Baptiste, who was so effective in Leigh’s Secrets & Lies. One reviewer referred to a ‘knockout performance’. Not entirely wrong because the nature of the performance is the knockout expression of Pansy’s continued anger, focused on herself, resentful, critical, unable to see the good in others or anything, and prone to extraordinary verbal outbursts which, for some may seem funny, but alarming for others, and raise concern about Pansy’s mental health.
At home, she is fussy, obsessively tidy, continually criticising her long-suffering builder husband and her 22-year-old unemployed son. She is concerned about her health, wants to sleep, continually angry.
A significant time is Mother’s Day. Her cheery sister, who has two lively daughters, is a hairdresser who looks after her sister but also becomes the butt of criticism, suggests they visit their mother’s grave at the cemetery. Pansy uses all kinds of excuses to delay her decision but eventually goes. She is unhappy at the cemetery where her sister cares for the grave, reminisces about her mother’s severity and favouritism of her sister. She is persuaded to go to her sister’s house for dinner, her husband and son there, she refusing to eat, silent and critical while the others try to cope. But, this is to be something of a breakthrough, some moments of hysterical laughter, weeping – but will this be enough?
There is audience sympathy for the silent and long-suffering husband and puzzlement about the son. Leigh’s home dramas are slices of life. And, in real life, Leigh is something of a curmudgeon himself and we wonder about what is projecting onto the character of Pansy and what he is saying about life’s hard experiences.
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