In this pint-sized filmic dosage of class war, Ray has told a lie to her daughter Liza that they and all of the previous residents of their tower block will be moved into a gleaming new luxury block of flats that is right by the council estate where they have been living. She has to admit it isn't true, in a melancholy moment.
Mother and daughter inveigle their way into the luxury block, get revealed and the situation becomes a confrontation, especially when Liza smashes a plate, deliberately. Ray smashes everything - or a lot - up, in a focused rage, at the end and goes at the camera, as if to throw down the camera itself.
Yep, this climax is almost literal sledgehammer stuff, but there's a representational history of frustrated impotent class rage going back through "The Hireling" (1973) and evidently so much of Ken Loach's work. BBC Films' overseer Rose Garnett allows a bit of Tony Garnett's conscious screen activism here. Curiously, this short film has strong echoes of Roy Kendall's Play for Today "Housewives' Choice" (1976), with its class war and housing-themed climactic confrontation, but, I'd argue, is more distilled and subtle. And it feels more rooted in direct contemporary issues: notably, East London's Focus E15 Campaign is given special thanks in the end-credits.
Indeed, class conflict is the dominant theme. We see how people of colour act as security guard functionaries of the system and a woman customer, about to move into the luxury flats, instinctively starts to film when Ray is effectively 'making a scene', when being messed around by security. Ray isn't allowed to just leave quietly as she seems willing to do. The Sales Negotiator guiltily puts some coins into the pram, pennies for the guy... The film contains a piquant visual contrast of Liza's Guy Fawkes effigy in the pram with the showroom mannequins in the luxury flat. The fire and sectarian conflict signified by bonfire night and the gunpowder plot. Like the disturbing contemporary horror film "His House" (2021), there is a theme of home being unsteady, assailed or threatened and people being uprooted by forces beyond their control, lacking in autonomy within their own lives. These forces are malign and banal: in that earlier film, the UK Home Office, here, UK capitalist real estate. Both of these have covert support from that fraction of the public happy to elect right-wing governments.
Writer-director Stella Scott, who already has a remarkably varied screen résumé, is certainly a trenchant voice to follow.
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