In the decade since its TV premiere, there has been only one go-to comparison point for anyone adapting a one-woman stage show for the screen; Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. At the very beginning of Effi o Blaenau, Marc Evans’s cinematic expansion of Gary Owen’s play Iphigenia in Splott, a direct-to-audience narration describing hard partying and harder hangovers for a young woman who hasn’t figured things out yet seems to put us in Fleabag territory. Yet, with a dreamlike atmosphere and a tale (told almost entirely in Welsh) of working-class women in an increasingly broken Britain, Effi o Blaenau almost immediately finds its own, entirely compelling, identity.
Moving the action from the Cardiff of the original play to the much more isolated former shale mining town of Blaenau is Evans and Owen’s (adapting his own material) first great decision. While it might shrink the world of its lead character, the unapologetically chaotic Effi (Leisa Gwenllian), it really expands the visual canvas Evans can play with, the mist-shrouded hills and treacherously dark and winding roads of the Welsh countryside around Blaenau making for bleakly gorgeous and impressively *huge* backdrops. While the quite naff opening and closing narrations, as well as the small-ish cast and dearth of extras, might betray Effi o Blaenau’s stage origins, that is never used as an excuse to keep things uncinematic, Evans letting social realism and striking design and location work coexist in a way that still feels too rare in British independent film.
Gwenllian is fantastic as Effi, transforming from party animal to something simultaneously more grown-up and more devastatingly vulnerable as a one-night stand with emotionally cowardly soldier Lee (Tom Rhys Harries) leaves Effi pregnant and at the mercy of the horrifically underfunded Welsh NHS maternity care system. Naturally, Evans and Owen get some political point-scoring in, but Effi o Blaenau is less interesting in being a polemic (really, what more is there to say about the miserable state of modern Britain) than a look at how ordinary people deal with unfixably grim circumstances.
Yes, that can be drinking and screaming and taking your pain and boredom out on others, but what is most moving here is the commitment to showing people expending what little energy they have left on small kindnesses. From the silent forgiveness offered by Effi’s nan after a blowout fight to dimly well-meaning sort of boyfriend Kev (Owen Alun) selling his Xbox to pay for a pram for a baby he knows isn’t his to a complete stranger offering comfort at a truly dystopian hospital, Effi o Blaenau perfectly balances the harrowing and the humane.
It’s melodramatic, certainly, but this is earned through the heightened tone Evans brings, lots of scenes playing less like ultra-grounded reality and more like the hazy state of waking up from a nightmare and having to take a minute to remember where the dream ended and your waking, logical life begins. A welcome shot in the arm for independent British filmmaking, fronted by a really fiery breakout performance from Gwenllian.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 