“Every decent director has only one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again. My subject is the exploitability of feelings, whoever might be the one exploiting them. It never ends. It’s a permanent theme. Whether the state exploits patriotism, or whether in a couple relationship, one partner destroys the other.”
So said Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the notorious and influential film director whose films brutally explored the moral ambiguities of post-war German society. Fassbinder&#8217;s brief but prolific 15-year spell of cinematic output still resonates today, and his mastery over the exploitability of feelings is an achievement not lost on Fyzal Boulifa, the British director of Lynn + Lucy, which is <a href="https://player.bfi.org.uk/subscription/film/watch-lynn-lucy-2019-online">now streaming on BFI Player</a>. In a recent Q&amp;A with the BFI, Boulifa answered questions in his home whilst perched in front of a poster of Fassbinder&#8217;s masterpiece, Ali: Fear Eats The Soul, and remarked that much like the cinema of the German auteur, his work is concerned with issues of &#8220;representation&#8221;. Fassbinder frequently challenged traditional forms of representation, playfully oscillating between brutal melodrama and comic irony to portray stories about people oppressed or exploited because of their race, class, sex and sexual orientation. As a contemporary director tackling questions of representation, Boulifa understands how cinema has the ability to challenge stereotypes and more honestly study both the beauty and ugliness of its characters. In turn, this forges a liminal space for the audience to ask questions of their own morality: how much of yourself do you see in these characters, and whose side are you on? It is this unflinching approach to representation that makes Lynn + Lucy one of the most fascinating British films of the year – a tragic and horrific tale of emotional exploitation – set against the backdrop of working-class life in Britain.
Set in Harlow, an Essex town located just outside Greater London&#8217;s tube line commuter boroughs, Lynn (brilliantly played by Roxanne Scrimshaw who was street cast via a local newspaper) and her best friend Lucy have been inseparable since school. However, Lynn&#8217;s disconnection from anything outside of motherhood or her close friendship with Lucy is made clear early on: upon starting her first job since school at a local hairdressing salon, she feels bullied by her colleagues and left out of the conversation. After Lucy is implicated in the cause of a tragic death, Lynn publicly condemns her best friend and begins to accrue social status as an arbiter of community safety, forming a kind of &#8216;neighbourhood watch&#8217; network that seeks to protect the group’s children and vilify Lucy in the process. Much like Fassbinder, Boulifa doesn&#8217;t shy away from on-screen discomfort, leaving the flaws, virtues and malicious intentions of all the characters clearly on display. Each shot is directed with precision, focusing on the lingering stares and covert whispers that emerge in the aftermath of the tragedy. As empathy and kindness begin to run in short supply, Boulifa creates a sense of relentless claustrophobia, using the proximity of the pair’s living situation to emphasise their widening emotional distance. Lynn holds a meeting in a local community centre to call for collective action against Lucy, and it&#8217;s easy to see the genesis of the group&#8217;s hatred – swap the physical space in front of the camera for daytime television call-in shows, online forums or the comment section of any online newspaper, and the story is much the same.
In recent years, working-class characters in British film and television have often been doomed to caricature or parody, or simply used as a proxy for whatever structural inequalities that the storyteller wants to highlight. In Lynn + Lucy, the &#8216;working-class-ness&#8217; of the film&#8217;s protagonists is accompanied by a more subtle approach, with the director taking care to keep the film&#8217;s colour palette bright and avoid ceding to lazy class stereotypes. What is clear though is that the characters of Lynn and Lucy live their lives in a society that has already set them up to fail, and the spectre of a deep-rooted viciousness lurks around every corner. Along the way we bump into a salon colleague who derides Lynn as &#8220;white trash&#8221; behind her back and an aspirational middle-class curtain-twitcher living down the road who remarks that &#8220;there are some people who should never reproduce&#8221;. This particular line is intended to shock, but it is hardly surprising for anyone who has grown up in the country where prime time television entertainment includes the class-baiting Can&#8217;t Pay We&#8217;ll Take It Away, Supernanny and Little Britain (a situation recently detailed in an excellent article by Jason Okundaye for <a href="https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/06/the-blair-show">The Tribune</a>).
Lynn + Lucy, in its brief 90-minutes of running time, succeeds in part because it does not make any obvious points about the background of the characters. At heart, it is a tragedy, primarily concerned with the elicitation of emotion rather than a straightforward, realist comment on the structural conditions the characters find themselves in. It is rare to see cinema directors make forays into the everyday stories of working people living in Britain today with the kind of fearlessness and playfulness that Fyzal Boulifa strives for his debut feature. Lynn + Lucy is a timely reminder that British cinema has a duty to better portray the complexity and diversity of narrative voices from low and lower-middle incomes – voices that neoliberalism and austerity have largely crowded out. We need representation to become one of the watchwords of the British filmmaking lexicon allowing for a more honest set of stories about, and from, people who grew up or who live in working-class Britain today. We need representations of happiness, sadness, grief, elation, success and failure; we need romance, drama, horror, comedy and everything in between. Perhaps then we can start reversing the damage of a media-complicit, decades-long misrepresentation of working-class life in Britain.
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<pre>Photo Credit: BFI / Lynn+Lucy</pre>

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An unflinching look at working-class Britain makes for one of the most fascinating films of the year.

Benjamin Yates