A few years back, Ben Wheatley announced plans for a series of films that would take the pulse of the British nation post-Brexit - a project that seems to have been put on hold after 2018's spirited Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (f.k.a., as I'm duty-bound to append, Colin, You Anus), possibly as the BBC no longer has the cash. The similarly adventurous Paul Andrew Williams now picks up that line of thought with his new state-of-the-nation drama Dragonfly, centralising as it does everyday life in those squashed provincial towns (here Castleford, passing for any number of equivalents in the South) left behind amid the death march of austerity. These particular lives are initially observed in abject isolation. A painfully frail-seeming Brenda Blethyn hobbles into shot as Elsie, a widow who sees no-one save a care worker who typically has six other clients to make time for on her daily rounds; an especially drained Andrea Riseborough, who at least has a gruff mastiff terrier to keep her company, is twitchy and tattooed as her neighbour Colleen. Two lonely women, then, two representative Brits, living side-by-side but otherwise entirely separate existences. Interventions and transgressions ensue. The dog goes hog wild on Elsie's prized flowerbeds; Colleen, in an atypically magnanimous gesture, offers to do Elsie's shopping for her by way of apology. No man is an island, even on an island where - both politically and spiritually - the people have done just about all they can to wall themselves off.
As you'd maybe expect from the above, Dragonfly shapes up as small and self-contained: visibly the kind of project you can still get made with the finite funding of the British indie sector (and with European funding starting to dry up), it finds Williams attempting to recreate the domestic bathos of certain Mike Leigh endeavours, poking around inside poky houses, tying himself to the kitchen sink. (Where this filmmaker's 2006 breakthrough sprinted breathlessly from London to Brighton, here he can barely summon the resources to go to the end of one street.) One crucial difference, however: this is a Mike Leigh scenario shot like a Michael Haneke film, as if to accentuate how unhealthy the state of play is. Williams sets the action under dishwater-grey skies, offering little in the way of sunshine; he zooms in on the two women's bungalows from the other side of the street, like the unknown cameraman in 2005's Hidden; he lingers on a table loaded with cakes and biscuits as Elsie potters offscreen to answer her front door. You may well start to dread the general direction of travel, and you'd be right to dread the direction of travel. With its 15 certificate, Dragonfly is never quite as jolting as Williams' previous film, 2021's violent revenge thriller Bull, but it's also far from the conspicuous cosiness of Williams' Silver Screen favourite Song for Marion: it forever feels more of an Andrea Riseborough film - chippy, vaguely confrontational - than it does a cuddly Brenda Blethyn vehicle, an intuition borne out by the film's closing moments.
It's not that this Britain is rotten beyond redemption: for a while, the two women strike up an alliance of sorts. It's just there's nothing much going on here: no jobs, no prospects, no sign of improvement any time soon. (In the end credits, Williams thanks his antidepressants, which scans.) For much of its running time, Dragonfly proves subtly disconcerting. The women's bond is set against a wider backdrop of carelessness; what Williams is describing is a recognisable sense of abandonment and stasis, of people being left to their own devices. Yet to demonstrate just how little is going on, he has to commit to a perilously low level of onscreen activity: an hour of scenes go by featuring nothing more dramatic than Elsie succumbing to a sneezing fit, or feeling her arthritis flare up again. Right through to January's Hard Truths - arguably the most potent Brexit movie, despite never once mentioning the B word - Leigh has actively shaped his scenes of the humdrum: his methodology identifies the conflicts in play and points his characters in a particular direction, be that tragic, comic or both. Williams, by contrast, merely shuffles his performers back and forth between bungalows, attempting to kill time before final-reel developments. The film, like the country it mirrors, ends up in limbo: neither one thing nor the other, neither here nor there. (One thing it could be: Williams' audition for Channel 5's incoming Play for Today revival.) Nudged along by its two rocksolid leads, Dragonfly is much like life, and very much like British life as it is today - but you may also start to wonder why you've paid to see it, when you can get much the same suffering at home for free.
Dragonfly opens in selected cinemas from Friday.
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