A modern-day Cinderella story about downtrodden women yearning to escape lives of quiet desperation, Chuck Chuck Baby is the feature debut of British writer-director Janis Pugh. Belatedly expanding her short film Blue Collars and Buttercups (2007), Pugh’s quasi-musical rom-com is partly a familiar underdog fable in the spirit of The Full Monty (1997) or Billy Elliot (2000), but with specific focus on female characters and a central queer love story. Following its world premiere at the recently revived Edinburgh Film Festival, this off-beat charmer makes its international debut in Toronto. LGBT themes should spark further festival interest, while feel-good sentiments and a rousing empowerment message could boost commercial breakout potential.
Chuck Chuck Baby takes place in working-class community in Flintshire, North Wales, a coastal county close to Liverpool. The setting may smack of classic British social-realist drama, but the tone here is more magical realist fairy-tale, bright and breezy and whimsical in parts. Pugh herself grew up in this area, and pays fond homage to her roots, reframing a fairly nondescript post-industrial landscape with a poetic eye and sunny palette. The region’s lush green hillscapes and rugged ocean vistas feature prominently.
Shy, repressed Helen (Louise Brealey) works a dead-end job in a chicken processing factory alongside a team of bawdy, boisterous female colleagues. She also still shares a tiny house with her boorish ex-husband Gary (Celyn Jones), his dim-witted 20-year-old girlfriend Amy (Emily Fairn), and their new baby. Why would anyone remain in this hellish domestic prison? It appears Helen is partly stuck here for pragmatic financial reasons, but also because she maintains a close bond with Gary’s terminally ill mother Gwen (Sorcha Cusack), serving as her unofficial carer and confidante.
Cruelly nicknamed “Helen the Handmaiden” by her co-workers, Pugh’s sensitive heroine is trapped under the crushing weight of low-self-esteem and limited life choices. But she dares to dream again following the unexpected return of glamorous tomboy Joanna (Annabel Scholey), her former secret girl-crush back when they were teenage classmates. A taciturn loner by nature, Joanna now leads an itinerant life working on electricity pylons, and initially seems indifferent to Helen. Even so, the shared romantic spark between them is never really in doubt, slowly building from veiled flirtation to full-blown infatuation, an outbreak of disruptive queerness which inevitably meets with anger and rejection from some more conservative quarters. The long and winding road to love and liberation is bumpy at times.
Pugh’s use of music in Chuck Chuck Baby is refreshingly inventive. Without breaching the fourth wall, characters telegraph their inner emotions by singing along to vintage tear-jerking tracks by Neil Diamond, Minnie Ripperton, Janis Ian and others. These songs are almost always diegetic, intruding on the drama in a notionally naturalistic manner, via radio speakers or record players. The contrivance of this approach sometimes jars, but it is an imaginative and mostly effective device.
Chuck Chuck Baby is a little unpolished in places. Pugh is no fan of subtlety, generally falling back on broad humour, big emotional gestures and sentimental screen clichés. When key characters have jolting changes of heart, it feels like contrived jeopardy rather than psychological truth. Dispensing warm-hearted wisdom on her twinkly Irish brogue, Gwen is more idealised guardian angel than rounded protagonist, a Geriatric Pixie Dream Girl if you will. Gary and Amy in particular are grotesquely ugly caricatures: she a spitefully moronic bimbo, he a risibly pompous clown, which weakens his third-act transformation into the story’s chief villain. Bullies can be comical but they need to be menacing too.
In fairness, Chuck Chuck Baby stakes no claim on naturalistic drama, and everybody here has a slightly cartoonish dimension. For all its rough edges and occasionally heavy-handed tactics, this lively debut also has ample charm and big-hearted humanity, especially in its matter-of-fact treatment of working-class gay characters, and its celebratory portrait of an unsung region of Britain that is rarely seen on screen. The two main leads also share a sweetly convincing chemistry, even if Helen seems a little too saintly to be true.
Working with an almost entirely female team, Pugh’s strong visual flair is evident throughout, notably in a series of striking musical set-pieces, including a rain-soaked song-and-dance number that pays knowing homage to Jacques Demy’s beloved classic The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). Another highlight is the climactic funeral scene, which explodes into a riotously funny, boozy, slow-motion brawl soundtracked by a deceptively cheery rendition of Ewan MacColl’s folk-rock standard Dirty Old Town. There is richly comic, insightful emotional terrain here that Pugh will hopefully get to explore further in future films.
Director, screenwriter: Janis Pugh
Cast: Louise Brealey, Annabel Scholey, Sorcha Cusack, Celyn Jones, Emily Fairn, Beverly Rudd, Emily Aston, Cat Simmons
Producers: Anne Beresford, Peggy Cafferty, Andrew Gillman, Adam Partridge
Cinematography: Sarah Cunningham
Editing: Rebecca Lloyd
Production design: Caroline Steiner
Production companies: Artemisia Films (UK), BBC Film (UK), Play House Studios (UK), Delta Pictures (UK), BFI (UK), Great Point Media (UK), Ffilm Cymru Wales (UK), MDF (UK)
World sales: The Yellow Affair
Venue: Edinburgh International Film Festival
In English
101 minutes
