Charlotte Regan’s first feature is small, bright and easy to like, with a remarkable child at its centre and a father who has some growing up to do. The whimsy occasionally gets in the way, but the two of them carry it.
Charlotte Regan’s first feature is about a twelve-year-old who has decided she does not need anybody. Georgie (Lola Campbell) lives alone in a council house in east London after her mother’s death, steals bikes with her friend Ali (Alin Uzun) to keep the rent paid, and fends off social services with a recording of an uncle who does not exist. Then a man in a tracksuit climbs over the back fence. This is Jason (Harris Dickinson), the father who left before she was born, and the film is the two of them working out whether they want each other. It is small, bright, 84 minutes long and easy to like, and we liked it.
Campbell had not acted before and you would not guess. She plays Georgie with her chin up and her arms folded, a child who has taught herself to talk like a landlord, and she is funniest when she is being most serious. Asked who is looking after her, she names an uncle called Winston Churchill and does not blink. Dickinson, bleached and boyish, plays Jason as a man who has never been in charge of anything and is alarmed to discover he would like to be. He is good at being told off by a child. Regan’s script keeps their scenes short and lets them bicker in the kitchen like people who have known each other for years rather than days.
Molly Manning Walker shoots the estate in flat summer light with plenty of sky, and Elena Muntoni has the terraces painted in sherbet pinks and yellows, so the place looks like something a child has coloured in rather than the grey estate British films usually give us. Oliver Cronk keeps Georgie in an oversized football shirt and puts Jason in a tracksuit that is trying a little too hard. Spiders in the corners of rooms discuss her in subtitles. Neighbours talk to camera in pairs about what they make of her. Billy Sneddon and Matteo Bini cut these interruptions in fast and get out again, and Patrick Jonsson’s score stays light and plucked and never tells us when to cry.
The whimsy is the film’s signature and also where it wobbles. The spiders are funny for exactly as long as they should be. The talking neighbours are funny the first time and then start to look like a director who does not trust a scene to stand up on its own. Around the middle the film runs short of things for Georgie and Jason to do together and sends them off to do quirky things instead, and for ten minutes or so it coasts. A few critics have found all this grating, and we can see why, though we think they miss how much of it is Georgie’s own way of looking rather than Regan showing off.
We laughed at Winston Churchill, out loud, and again when Jason tries to explain to Georgie what a dad is for and finds he does not know. And there is that room upstairs that Georgie keeps locked and is slowly filling with scrap. What she is building in there we will not describe, but when the film finally shows us it caught us harder than the sunny surface had led us to expect, and Campbell plays the moment without a line. It is the one place the film’s grief and its playfulness are in the same shot.
The story goes where stories about absent fathers go. Anyone who has seen one will not be surprised by the destination, though they may be surprised by how gently the film arrives there and by how little it asks Jason to earn along the way. Regan is kinder to him than we might have been. That fits a film told from a child’s height, but it leaves the last stretch feeling lighter than the material underneath it.
Ken Loach’s Kes (1969) is the film British stories about working-class children still get measured against, and it was made in grey. Regan has looked at the same kind of street and decided it can be pink without the rent getting any easier to pay. Take a child of about Georgie’s age if you have one, or a parent if you still have one. It carries a 12A and runs 84 minutes, and it does not waste any of them.
