Putting an unusually sweet and sunny spin on the classic ingredients of gritty British social-realist cinema, Scrapper is a hugely charming debut feature from young British writer-director Charlotte Regan. Essentially a two-hander between luminous pre-teen screen novice Lola Campbell and Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness), this warm-hearted comedy drama chronicles the bumpy relationship between a recently bereaved girl and her long-estranged dad. Premiered at Sundance, where it won the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition, Regan’s heart-tugging urban fairy tale has since picked up multiple gongs and plaudits, including the Young Audience Award at last week’s European Film Awards. It continues to captivate festival audiences worldwide, screening in El Gouna this week.
Perhaps inevitably, many critics have drawn comparisons between Scrapper and last year’s Cannes sensation Aftersun (2022), another emotionally charged father-daughter story from another young British female director, Charlotte Wells. But any parallels in this tale of two Charlottes are largely superficial. Regan strikes a much more quirky and playful tone, flirting with magical realist elements and recurring chorus characters who break the fourth wall to comment on the narrative. At times these style-heavy elements feel a little forced and cartoonish, but Scrapper mostly finds a tonal sweet spot between self-conscious artifice and cutesy whimsy.
A winningly magnetic, hilariously deadpan presence on screen, Campbell plays Georgie, an unusually wise 12-tear-old living on a rainbow-coloured social housing estate on the semi-rural fringes of London. After the death of her mother Vicky (Olivia Brady, glimpsed only in flashback), Georgie now willingly lives alone, smartly keeping social workers and schoolteachers at bay with a fabricated back story that a non-existent uncle is now looking after her welfare. To pay the bills, she steals bicycles with her best friend Ali (Alin Uzun), which she then sells on to a local dealer Zeph (Ambreen Razia). Regan may be alluding to Vittorio de Sica’s Italian neo-realist classic Bicycle Thieves (1948) here, but cycle parts also play a key emotional role as Georgie works throigh the stages of grief. In a private locked room, she is building a surreal tower of scrap metal, apparently with fanciful dreams of climbing up to visit her late mother in heaven.
Georgie’s proud self-reliance take an unexpected knock when Jason (Dickinson), a 30-year-old man-child claiming to be the long-lost father she never knew, arrives out of the blue. Initially suspicious, but fearing her fakery will be exposed, she grudgingly allows him to stay. Regan then charts the duo’s hesitant journey towards mutual trust and friendship, which involves a shared interest in petty crime, dancing, metal-detecting walks in the countryside, and Jason clumsily trying to assume adult responsibility after Georgie beats up one of her mean-girl bullies during an emotionally fraught meltdown. In one inspired set-piece, the pair bond by play-acting dialogue for an upper-class couple they spot on a train station platform, a totally implausible scenario but a great opportunity for both stars to display their comic chops.
Regan comes to cinema after a colourful career as a paparazzi photographer, prolific music video maker and shorts director. Along the way she picked up BAFTA nominations and notable industry fans, including Michael Fassbender, who has an executive producer credit on Scrapper. Fassbender reportedly instructed his production company DMC Film to find the next Andrea Arnold, which makes sense here in the working-class London edgelands milieu at least.
Even if Scrapper is occasionally guilty of sentimental button-pushing and softening fairly dark themes, it is consistently funny, big-hearted and illuminated from within by two great lead performances. Drawing on her own family upbringing, Regan’s assured debut is a refreshingly positive portrait of proletarian lives typically depicted by British film-makers as dour, drab and dysfunctional. She even insisted on repainting her East London housing estate location in bright pastel colours, an exacting visual detail worthy of Antonioni. Cinematographer Molly Manning Walker, who made her own splashy feature-directing debut this year with How to Have Sex, makes a delicious visual feast out of this vivid Wes Anderson palette.
Director, screenwriter: Charlotte Regan
Cast: Lola Campbell, Harris Dickinson, Alin Uzun, Cary Crankson, Carys Bowkett, Ambreen Razia, Ayokunle Oyesanwo, Ayobami Oyesanwo, Ayooluwa Oyesanwo, Freya Bell
Producer: Theo Barrowclough
Executive producers: Eva Yates, Farhana Bhula, Michael Fassbender, Conor McCaughan, Daniel Emmerson, Jim Reeve
Cinematography: Molly Manning Walker
Editing: Billy Sneddon, Matteo Bini
Production designer: Elena Muntoni
Costume designer: Oliver Cronk
Music: Patrick Jonsson
Production companies: BFI (UK), BBC Film (UK), Great Point Media (UK), DMC Film (UK)
World sales: Charades
Venue: El Gouna Film Festival
In English
84 minutes
