Chuck Chuck Baby review - love among the feathers | reviews, news & interviews
Chuck Chuck Baby review - love among the feathers
Chuck Chuck Baby review - love among the feathers
Louise Brealey and Annabel Scholey shine in a working-class musical romance
![](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/mast_image_landscape/public/mastimages/8aZBXqv0.jpg?itok=O6Ul-2s7)
As Janis Pugh’s semi-autobiographical Chuck Chuck Baby draws to a close, the camera fondly plays around the smiling faces of some of its voiceless female characters – careworn middle-aged workers in a Welsh chicken processing factory. They're cheered by finally seeing something good happen to one of their number.
The woman in question is Helen (Louise Brealey), at the start a near-broken drudge, pushing 40 and consigned to domestic misery, her only noticeable gifts her kindness and capacity for self-sacrifice. Though her spark hasn’t been entirely extinguished, Helen has been paralysed by inertia, feeling obliged to support her odious husband, Gary (Celyn Jones), his vacuous 20-year-old live-in Scouser girlfriend, Amy (Emily Fairn), and their newborn, and Gary’s bedridden mother, Gwen (Sorcha Cusack).
They dwell inharmoniously in Gwen's house on a dispiriting estate in Pugh’s native Flintshire. Rejected by Gary because she couldn’t bring a baby to term, Helen has for years slept alone in the room she intended as a nursery, staying on to tend Gwen, the ailing fairy godmother she loves.
Shyly hiding her beauty, Helen has been kept going by the warmth and raucous banter of her workmates – empathetic Clare (Cat Simmons), canny Lynn (Emily Aston), ebullient (and tactless) Paula (Beverly Rudd, pictured right), and perceptive Katrina (Edyta Budnik), who gives the others impromptu morale-boosting haircuts in the loos.
The shock to the system Helen needs arrives in the shape of her former high-school crush, Joanne (Annabel Scholey), a self-contained but traumatized pylon-maintenance technician. The pair tentatively flirt their way toward consummating the love they suspended two decades previously. In fact, they never even spoke – can you love someone you never spoke to? Maybe.
After a 20-year absence, Joanne has returned to the town she left after being sullied by her father, the repeated abuse (not involving actual sexual contact apparently) gloatingly observed by Gary and other troglodytes; when, anticipating Helen’s defection, Gary calls Joanne “filthy”, he’s unknowingly referring to his pathological gynophobia. Viewers of all genders and persuasions should be able to relate to Chuck Chuck Baby’s slowburning romance, but writer-director Pugh doesn’t conceal her rage at the inhumane ways some men treat women.
Her movie is laced with delicate visual and aural flourishes rare in earthy, humour-tinged dramas about the travails of working-class women. Cinematographer Sarah Cunningham’s procession of flat establishing shots distilling the region’s urban dreariness means the counterpointing shots lyricizing Helen and Joanne’s amorous dance are all the more effective. Helen excitedly threads her way toward Joanne between sheets and strips of cloth hanging on clotheslines. The camera tilts down from a sun and sea crayoned on a sheet to Helen lying in an outdoor bath and scrunching her nose adorably; fully clothed, Joanne jumps into the bubbles. It’s a hypnotically sensual sequence that wouldn’t have worked if they’d already had sex; that it takes place on a washing day is a reminder that, for women like this film's, every day is washing day. (Pictured below: Annabel Scholey, Louise Brealey)
Pugh has Helen and Joanne and their mates sing along with (rather than lipsynch, Dennis Potter-style) popular songs that express their pent-up feelings and existential dilemmas. Brealey – magnificent here, her Helen an over-brimming well of emotion – wrings torment and defiance from Neil Diamond’s “I Am…I Said” as she drives along the Dee Estuary shore to work.
In the blue-black shadows of Joanne’s unchanged teenage bedroom, its walls festooned with pictures of women actors, singers, and models, Scholey renders Janis Ian’s “From Me to You” a rueful commentary on why she had to leave her dad’s house before she and Helen could do more than exchange glances at school.
Best of all is Brealey’s dance of sexual reawakening as, astonishing and thrilling her fellow workers, she trills along with touching amateurishness to Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleurs” as chicken feathers fall on the factory floor. Here and there, Pugh rhymes the feathers with floating dandelion pappi; such gossamer love emblems and the appearance of blue magic mushrooms discovered on a hilltop by Helen’s work crew during a rural jaunt fleetingly endow the film with the kind of airy Shakespearian enchantment Bill Forsyth practiced in his films.
Like Forsyth, Pugh knows when to bring her characters back down to earth – grim realities being inescapable in North Wales. In fact, the misogynistic drives and agendas that long kept Helen and Joanne apart rear up again to cast doubt on an ending that has long seemed inevitable – notwithstanding which, Helen neatly catches a last windblown puffball with a gleam in her eye.
Subscribe to theartsdesk.com
Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
To take a subscription now simply click here.
And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?
more Film
![Stan and Ollie prepare for 'The Battle of the Century'](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/003559_m01_battle-of-the-century_still003_53781665763_o.jpg?itok=y-W_2h8i)
![Sister act: Bianca Delbravo, Dilvin Asaad, and Safira Mossberg in 'Paradise Is Burning'](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/Main%20pic%20PisBurning.jpeg?itok=M-QpAFJr)
![Colman Domingo and Clarence Maclin in 'Sing Sing'](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/Sing%201.jpeg?itok=FzGLffp-)
![Caught on the woof: Eddie Peng and best friend in Guan Hu’s tale of provincial struggle](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/Black%20Dog%20pic.jpeg?itok=4flF1pOd)
![David Morrissey: 'When I discovered my drama group at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, that saved my life'](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/Morrissey%20MAIN.jpg?itok=tsYiugwk)
![Gael force: Kneecap's Liam Óg, JJ Ó Dochartaigh, and Naoise Ó Caireállain](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/three%20shot%20Kneecap.jpeg?itok=wbu8VQio)
![The night they invented champagne: Barbe (Haley Bennett) concocts her latest vintage](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/Barb%20MAIN.jpg?itok=7HfioYC9)
![This is reception: Hunter Schafer in 'Cuckoo'](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/CUCKOO-Still-1-Credit-Felix-Dickinson-Courtesy-of-NEON.jpg?itok=9T-JMH2b)
![Losing his way. Zhu Yilong in 'Only the River Flows'](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/Only-The-River-Flows1.jpg?itok=Xe75y-DM)
![Alienated youth: Rain (Cailee Spaeny) takes on the mantle of Ripley, with David Jonsson as 'synthetic' Andy](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/Spaeyny%20and%20Jonsson.jpeg?itok=At6et-4p)
![A glimpse of the director, with Mawlawi Mansour at right](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/Hollywoodgate%203.jpg?itok=sUZKpWKk)
![Richard Chamberlain and Glenda Jackson tie the knot in 'The Music Lovers'](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/5009250_THE%20MUSIC%20LOVERS_A%20BFI%20BLU-RAY%20RELEASE%20Image%20courtesy%20MGM%20%26%20Park%20Circus.jpg?itok=hV9gAlOE)
Add comment