Here’s a rousing empowerment-anthem of a movie that’s not afraid to paint its romance plotline in big, bold brushstrokes; occasionally it overdoes things but the rush of emotion carries everything along in its path, helped by the deployment of radio-friendly standards by Neil Diamond and the like that turns the film into an impromptu musical and allows writer-director Janis Pugh to stage (relatively) elaborate dance sequences and big emotional scenes.
The central figure is put-upon chicken-processing factory worker Helen (played by Louise Brealey) who has a complicated domestic situation: she lives in the same crummy terrace as her oafish husband Gary, from whom she is separated but seemingly not actually divorced, and shares the place with his new, much younger, girlfriend Amy (Emily Fairn) and their newly arrived baby. Also on the premises is Gary’s terminally ill mother Gwen (Sorcha Cusack), for whom Helen acts a carer but is the quasi-maternal figure that Helen appears to long for. There’s also a rowdy Greek chorus of Helen’s fellow factory workers who are perhaps designed as a counterpoint to Helen’s introverted, clenched unhappiness, at least at first.
The dam breaks with the arrival next door of glamorous returnee Joanne (Annabel Scholey) who, it turns out, had fascinated Helen right back from their schooldays together, 20 years earlier – though, we are given to understand, they barely spoke. But it doesn’t take long before Joanne is turning up at the factory with her sports car and ghetto blaster and whisking Helen off for a bit of romancing, in which a detached store-mannequin doll’s head and a pair of stilts play a significant part. Joanne isn’t quite the problem-free zone she initially appears: she has her own backstory of upset and humiliation to cope with, too.
Pugh’s film mixes standard-issue Brit-misery realism with elements of whimsy: the opening scene, for example, features a floating dandelion seed-head that is amusingly reminiscent of the drifting tumbleweed in the Coen brother’s Big Lebowski, and one of the musical numbers descends into a massive chicken-carcass fight inside the factory. (You have to hope the poultry weren’t real.) In contrast, Pugh stages a genuinely alarming scene in which Gary – hitherto a bit of a pantomime villain – loses it at a funeral with briefly terrifying results. Both leads are very good, with Brealey in particular handling the switch of registers – from heart-to-hearts with Gwen, bitter disagreements with Gary, and supercharged, over-the-top singalongs – with aplomb. In the end, Pugh’s film undoubtedly wants to warm hearts, and this it manages to full effect.
Chuck Chuck Baby screened at the Edinburgh film festival
