Scrappers: "Lollipop"

Lollipop is the British film industry writing what it knows. Ten years ago, director Daisy-May Hudson made Half Way, a documentary that followed her mother and younger sister as they bounced between various forms of social housing; as I noted at the time, the project was unusually sharp-eyed both about this family's plight and the interpersonal conflict that resulted from it. It's taken a decade - either because those circumstances remain a tough sell, or Hudson was waiting for things at home to settle down - but the core of Half Way has now been repurposed for a dramatic feature that really does feel like a collective effort, something that's had to be nursed onto the screen with care and sensitivity. In the mother role, Hudson subs in a decidedly sinkable Molly Brown (Posy Sterling), released from prison in the opening scene to start from scratch in a world where her two young children have been taken into care and she has to spend her first night of freedom sleeping in a tent in a park. Here from the off is someone who's slipped through the social safety net, and is now obliged to navigate a cruelly labyrinthine system to try and get upright again. For starters: to regain custody of her kids - her top priority - Molly needs ID, but what ID she has is in storage with a mother from whom she in turn is estranged. When we meet Sylvie (TerriAnn Cousins), introduced correcting the pitch of her daughter's singing voice at a wake for her late husband, we instantly understand why; this woman's paranoid ramblings about the outside world are merely a further reason to step back. (The title is Sylvie's pet name for Molly, and decidedly ironic, given the sourness that exists between these two.) With money, Hudson proposes, Molly would be on an easier street, because she'd have something to throw at the problems that pop up before her. Without it, Lollipop demonstrates, life is an obstacle course of non-starting cars, dodgy landlords, stray dogs, endless bureaucracy, and sleepless nights where if the noises outside your tent don't keep you awake, the worries inside your head will.

So it is tough, but Molly's predicament unlocks layers of conflict and jeopardy that recent Britflicks haven't troubled to access; the closest reference point would be Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake with the emphasis shifted onto the Hayley Squires character. Half Way was an unusually raw watch, in part because its focus was a life lived on the hoof, in part because Hudson couldn't have known where that story was headed when she first picked up the camera. BBC-sponsored fiction demands tighter parameters, more overt reassurance, but Lollipop retains some edge of unpredictability: it's a mix of good and very good scenes with the odd performance that hasn't quite been finessed to the requisite level. As a dramatist, Hudson has an eye and ear for confrontations between authentically rough-edged people talking and acting at crosspurposes, and she's emerged from similar circumstances as a pretty good strategist; the action isn't just lived-in, it's been thought through. A more conventional retelling of this story would have Molly butting heads with the same stonyfaced administrators, for reasons of continuity and budget; in Lollipop, she's constantly running up against different bureaucrats, a choice that speaks both to Molly's struggle to gain any kind of foothold - she keeps having to explain herself anew - and how this line of work typically burns everybody out. Every now and again, the pressure is seen to relent: on a camping excursion where living in a tent is the norm and we get some idea of what this family might be were they afforded time and space, a couple of slightly cringy dancing scenes that invoke the spectre of two-step garage and prove you can't make a Britfilm nowadays without some form of knees-up. (These scenes can be spliced into the trailer to make a hard sell appear easier viewing than it is.) Yet the unflinching close-ups, jittery handheld and raised voices keep pushing Lollipop in a different direction: here is the panic such situations foster, the uncertainty of not knowing how things will pan out, as experienced by a homeless mother keen to make every last second of her supervised visits count and a first-time fiction director trying to finish her debut before the funding dries up. It can be a rough ride, but Lollipop's strongest material really is strong; here, Hudson brings us closer to the truth of the poverty line than most.

Lollipop is now showing in selected cinemas.