‘DRAGONFLY’at the ARTS picture HOUSE
Andrea Risborough and Brenda Blethyn as Colleen and Elsie
This film is a serious study of people distressed by anguished alienation .Director Paul Andrew Williams joins a cadre of cinema over the past four decades from desperate homelessness in Cathy Come Home to Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies and Vera to Ken Loach’s entire creative life.
Dragonfly is a quietly powerful film about loneliness in our time. A simple unremarkable scene – social housing on a busy urban road – shows a pair of joined bungalows. Ordinary as it looks the mundane set nonetheless acts as part of the threatening cityscape of the story. We meet Elsie in one, lonely and alienated among the souless blocks of building around her. They play no part in her life. This bleak but functional social housing begins the skilful menace. Elsie, a brilliant Brenda Blethyn has known companionship and care, pictures of her dead husband edge into view :she mourns the loving life she had with him, when Colleen, her newly -discovered next door neighbour asks her “ Did he look after you?” Elsie has no hesitation “ Oh yes, we looked after each other.’
But no one has ever looked after Colleen, a great performance by Andrea Riseborough who exudes neediness and neglect.
She tells Elsie how her father abandoned her family and when she was eight, her mother disappeared taking only her little brother. Colleen in a mixture of kindness and manipulation, takes over Elsie’s life. Add in her aggressive- looking dog (a ruse Hitchcock named the McGuffin – a figure thrown into the action to mislead the viewers) and in no time, she is shopping and cooking for Elsie. Colleen hates the well- meaning overworked council carers and drives them away with bitter hostility - leaving her in sole control.
This is an amazing film. Producer Dominic Tighe steered its carefully managed detail, often hidden in snippets of conversation or small glimpses of camerawork .His company ironically named Giant Productions laboured on a limited budget to make it fascinating to re-play in the mind . The script is detailed and compelling. What appeared to be an account of everyday life is so delicately structured it demands debate and discussion long after the film is over.
Brenda Blethyn is consummate in her performance – determined yet bewildered she edges towards disaster with a nervous optimism about her new friend. Her son John, Jason Watkins practical and smilingly helpful on his all-too-seldom visits takes a vital role and makes its shocking denouement horribly believable.
Two major crises collide in this work – the loneliness of the old and the isolation of the disturbed. As a friend ,the actor Andrew Sear once remarked to me about Care in the Community ,“ Have you looked at the Community lately?”
