Stop me if you’ve heard this one before; a debut film from a British director funded by the BBC and BFI is a gritty, naturalist, Ken Loach-esque look at socioeconomic misery in the modern UK. It’s the tale of so many first-time efforts from new UK talents, so to break through this often very samey noise, you need a mountain of raw power to rise above your identikit stablemates. Luckily, Daisy-May Hudson’s Lollipop has exactly this power, a heartwrenching look at motherhood on the poverty line and how women must claw their way through our byzantine and underfunded care systems just to be treated as human beings.
Based in part on Hudson’s own experiences of homelessness and family hostels, Lollipop follows Molly (Posy Sterling), a single mother of two who has just been released from a four-month prison stint to find that her own mother Sylvie (TerriAnn Cousins), who was meant to be looking after the kids, gave them up to local authorities. Now homeless, spending some nights indoors but others in a tent in the park, Molly begins the dehumanising, deliberately impossible process of proving that she deserves her children back, caught in a vicious cycle of not being able to apply for suitable housing without the children and not being able to get the children without the housing.
It’s a cinematic cry of rage at the cruel, tight-gripping claws of poverty and robotic bureaucracy in broken Britain (Molly is constantly told to calm down, to not respond *like a person* to her hideous circumstances), all exacerbated by the casual but omnipresent misogyny that underpins all these systems. The results are deeply moving, Hudson’s camera holding on Molly’s face during the moments of most extreme sadness *and* jubilation, with Sterling’s tortured central performance an extremely powerful anchor for this story.
Refusing an unrelenting grimness, though, Hudson also finds moments of joy and solidarity, particularly in scenes with Molly’s college friend Amina (Idil Ahmed), herself a single mother going through quasi-homelessness. This pair are one another’s constant support system, their sorority played beautifully, a beacon of stability even as Molly derails and makes some awful, tragic decisions. The love between her and her kids is also the fuel for many of Lollipop’s warmest moments, 11 year old Ava and 5 year old Leo both remarkably emotionally intelligent and well-acted, though there is still a subtler heartbreak here as we see Ava quietly forcing herself to become the responsible adult in her own life.
It’s not all perfect, and there are elements that do show Lollipop to very much be a ‘debut British film’. Outside of the powerhouse close-ups, it’s visually indistinct, rarely getting a sense of the places that these characters have such hard times living in and there are a couple of overwrought scenes (an impromptu rural camping trip, and act of vengeance against a dodgy landlord) that break the spell of an otherwise resolutely realistic film. But those are, in the grand scheme of things, minor issues – Hudson is another thrilling new British talent to emerge in the 2020s, joining the likes of Charlotte Wells, Georgia Oakley, Ben Sharrock and more as our new crop of auteurs. Let’s just hope the British film industry can sustain them.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 