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British feature Lollipop can’t be faulted on urgency and a stamp of personal commitment. Writer-director Daisy-May Hudson has based her fiction debut on her family’s own experience of homelessness, which also inspired her 2015 documentary Half Way. Lollipop follows single mother Molly (Posy Sterling), just released from prison and eager to be reunited with her two children, aged five and 11, who are in foster care.
But to get near them, Molly must negotiate a maze of often paradoxical Social Services requirements: she can’t find housing unless she has custody of the children, but can’t get custody until she has housing.
Lollipop is very much in the time-honoured British social-realist tradition — with strong echoes of Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake. A recurrent image is of Molly desperately trying to communicate through Plexiglas partitions with officials who wearily intone pre-scripted protocol. Jaime Ackroyd’s camera often holds tight on Molly, while the officials she deals with become a chorus of impersonal voices off. It’s more than understandable that she snaps, doing things that will inevitably prejudice her case.
Hudson doesn’t entirely push against the conventions of her chosen form, and aspects of Lollipop feel generic — like the sequences in which Molly and her friend Amina (Idil Ahmed) express their closeness and solidarity by dancing to favourite beats, a recurrent British cinema tic since Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank.
Nevertheless, Lollipop presses its case with impressive steeliness; clearly both lived and meticulously researched, it has an irreducible ring of the real. It contains some terrific performances too — notably from TerriAnn Cousins as Molly’s self-absorbed alcoholic mother, and from Tegan-Mia Stanley Rhoads as Molly’s daughter, who often seems more stable and worldly-wise than she does. And in the lead, Sterling displays a wirelike sharpness, leanness and containment that carry you through Molly’s travails with formidable intensity.
★★★☆☆
In cinemas now
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