On leaving prison, Lollipop’s thirtyish single mum Molly discovers that reclaiming her kids from social care is akin to doing lengths in a shark-infested swimming pool teeming with naval mines.
Thanks to Posy Sterling’s technically astounding performance – a whirligig of fluctuating, gut-level emotions – audience sympathy with Molly never flags. Despite her Cockney toughness, she’s a woman under the influence (of traumas galore), on the verge of a nervous breakdown, at the end of her tether.
But as a frantic, flailing woman constantly going off the deep end, she harms her cause. More than anyone else watching Daisy-May Hudson’s campaigning realist drama, working-class mothers who've been through the mill will understand Molly’s anguish and losses of control – also her capacity for maternal joy.
Hudson’s auspicious first fiction film draws from her 2015 documentary Half Way, which she filmed after her, her younger sister, and their mother were evicted from their long-rented Epping home. It vividly captured their experience of homelessness, hostel-living, and the stony indifference of the housing authorities. Like Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home (1966), Half Way prompted a parliamentary inquiry into the plight of people with nowhere to live.
One of the bitterest pills that Molly has to swallow is learning that going to prison (for an undisclosed crime) meant she “voluntarily made” herself “intentionally homeless.” Forced to sleep in a tent near East London tower blocks that mock her destitution, she hasn’t a hope of retrieving from foster care 12-year-old Ava and five-year-old Leo (played respectively by the alarmingly talented Tegan-Mia Stanley Rhoades and Luke Howitt).
Molly's despair in the face of institutional intransigence likens Lollipop to Loach’s Ladybird, Ladybird (1996), but there’s nothing imitative in Hudson’s direction or the moment-by-moment flow of the dangerously impulsive Molly’s turmoil as rendered by Sterling (pictured below with Luke Howitt and Tegan-Mia Stanley Rhoades).
The kids love Molly to bits and need her as much as she needs them. It’s sickening for her to miss such landmarks as the distraught Ava’s first period – which she knows intuitively how to handle better than the well-meaning foster mother Sheila (Joanna Allitt) – and Leo’s first day at school.
Initially driven to assuage her pain more than consider her kids’ stability, Molly makes selfish, self-sabotaging choices. Gradually, she learns that her job isn’t to fight the council care workers, no matter how impersonal, obtuse, and conspiratorial they are – especially in administering draconian but fallible protective regulations – but to calm herself and assure them that she’s the person best equipped to raise them. But that’s dependent on her housing the three of them.
“The social” isn’t Molly’s only opponent. Mourning her second husband, Molly’s feckless mum Sylvie (TerriAnn Cousins, as convincing here as she was in her similar Silver Haze role) relinquished her care of Ava and Leo when Molly was inside. When Molly rashly absconds with the kids, Sylvie informs the police of their whereabouts.
One of the film’s strongest suits is its psychological depth. Sylvie’s unthinking infantilisation of Molly (or “Lollipop” as she still calls her), which Molly colludes in, impedes her maturation and continues to humiliate her.
Though Ava tellingly repeats Sylvie’s mantra – “I can’t wait to squeeze you” – she proves more emotionally intelligent than either her mother or grandmother. She knows Molly’s interferences with Sheila’s fostering will destroy the family’s chance of reuniting, and reads her the riot act. Ava’s resistance to Molly poses the biggest issue in the court case that will determine if Molly will get the kids back.
The long-term reverberation of domestic violence is an insistent theme in Lollipop. A conversation between Sylvie and Molly late in the film is surprising in its intimacy, less in its revelation that, as was Molly, Sylvie was abused (by Molly's dad), perhaps explaining her alcoholism.
Abused by her partner, too, was Amina (Idil Ahmed), the old school friend and mother whom Molly reconnects with – and who plays a pivotal role in her rehabilitation. That Sylvie helped Amina get a job as a carer resonates in a story that champions women’s solidarity. Hudson even mitigates the actions of the woman (Andrea Lowe) who swindled Amina of a sizeable chunk of money: she seemingly did up her house to help get over her young daughter's death,
Jaime Ackroyd’s cinematography is as attuned to Molly’s upheavals as her moments of repose, while James William Blades’s understated music is used as a colour in the film’s palette rather than to manipulate viewers’ feelings. If Amina’s literary-sounding remark “Women are like lotus flowers. The thicker the mud, the more beautiful we grow” strains credibility, its sentiment rings true. As a crucial British movie, Lollipop will take some licking.
