The contemporary British fairytale Pin Cushion has the look of a particular kind of movie. It has the quirky title; it could engender its own tie-in knitwear line; it features a lot of art direction; and one early shot of kittens in a pet shop window plays as flagrant pandering to that audience that traditionally turns out for that type of movie. What's interesting about it is that the characters from that type of movie are here seen to run up against the unyielding brick wall that is the real world, which gives rise to something more dramatic and affecting - something that doesn't merely come off as cosmetic or cutesy. Writer-director Deborah Haywood shows us exactly why her main characters, a mother-daughter pairing, have wrapped a protective bubble or shawl around themselves, before tempting them to throw it off, for better and worse. In the nondescript provincial town to which the pair have moved - thoughtful location work here - they present as hopeless outsiders: ma Lyn (Joanna Scanlan) a sadsack with a hunched back, her offspring Iona (Lily Newmark) pale and redheaded, prone to spinning tales that suggest she was rescued from a forest in a bid to impress her new school's meaner girls. Iona subsequently turns crueller in her effort to assimilate; it's a development that leaves them both even more vulnerable than they were before.
Thus does the film set out to explore the mother-daughter axis, that long-term site of feminist inquiry, and one that has enabled distaff filmmakers to try and counter the now more than faintly tired father-son tropes of so much Western cinema. The central relationship Haywood draws here reminded me a little of the Saoirse Ronan-Laurie Metcalf scenes in January's Lady Bird: beneath its chunky cable-knits, Pin Cushion is another heartfelt drama describing the process whereby one generation rebels against (yet ultimately has to make some kind of peace with) what's come before, put together by someone who was once a teenage girl but is now a fully-fledged woman, with the perspicacity and distance to see both sides of the coin. (Proposed season: From Greer to Gerwig, in which young female creatives come to terms with the possibility their former role models may some day give into naff, cranky or deeply conservative positions.) I think I should point out - especially given the understandably enthusiastic reviews Pin Cushion has so far accumulated - that this is an odder and bumpier film than its predecessor(s), its eccentricity extending to a tendency to cut away from scenes at the point their internal conflicts could be heightened or deepened.
The whole thing, indeed, runs to just 82 minutes, which is useful if you've got chores to be getting on with, but in an age when Michael Bay can extend individual Transformers movies to a willy-waggling 160 minutes, Pin Cushion well might have supported another ten or twenty, if the budget had allowed for it. As it is, Haywood's ending - a sidestep into another genre, raising more questions than it answers - felt to me a little blunt and underfinessed. What's clear already, however, is that this filmmaker has an eye for a detailed, cinematic image, an acute ear for sound (one lingering impression: the malevolent whispering behind these characters' backs) and a feel for those themes that might engage younger audiences: Iona's blossoming touches upon peer pressure, bullying, low self-esteem, and many of those other things you and I may be relieved to have left behind in our youth. Haywood also displays a sure hand with actors: the newbie Newmark - possessed of that translucent skin the cinema and its DoPs have long venerated, in part as it registers as a window within a screen - capable of projecting a muted sensitivity even when Iona is acting at her most thoughtlessly adolescent, while Scanlan - so good on TV (The Thick of It, Getting On), and an actress apparently possessed of zero vanity whatsoever - makes an indelible figure as she potters and limps around on her lonesome. Unarguably promising.
Pin Cushion is now playing in selected cinemas.
No comments:
Post a Comment