Sarah Gavron (2019)

In her previous film, Suffragette (2015), Sarah Gavron worked with a stellar cast of women – including Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter and Meryl Streep – to disappointing effect.  Most of the main characters in Rocks are teenage girls, played by kids making their screen debut, and the result is terrific.  Over the two years of the film’s development Gavron shot 150 hours of footage (and cast members also made recordings on their iPhones).  You’d never guess it from the dramatically shapely, ninety-three-minute feature that the director and her editor, Maya Maffioli, have distilled and crafted from this overabundance of material.

Rocks is the nickname of the sixteen-year-old protagonist, Shola Omotose (Bukky Bakray), the child of a Nigerian mother and a Jamaican father.  Rocks lives with her single parent Funke (Layo-Christina Akinlude) and eight-year-old brother Emmanuel (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu) in a council flat in present-day Hackney.  At school, Rocks is a bright, popular student in a multi-racial class of girls – her best friend is Sumaya (Kosar Ali), from a Somali Muslim family.  She’s also a talented make-up artist with Instagram pictures to prove it.  Funke has had mental health issues in the past (their extent and consequences aren’t explained).  One day, Rocks, after picking up Emmanuel from his school, returns home to find a note in which their mother remorsefully explains that she has to get away, needs space to get her head in order.  Both children miss their mother but they get on well, and Rocks gets on with looking after her young brother – until Geraldine (Joanna Brookes), a well-meaning neighbour, contacts social services.  When Rocks sees people from ‘social’ outside the flat and realises what’s going on, she embarks on a desperate, resourceful effort to prevent her Emmanuel and herself from being taken into care.

Gavron, who worked from a screenplay by Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson, sets the scene and builds the story expertly – fair-mindedly too.  At Rocks’s school, for example, the girls are repeatedly told what they can’t wear (trainers, jewellery, shades).  From their point of view, the rules are a pain in the neck but Gavron shows the school staff doing their job rather than enjoying being spoilsports (in fact, the rules may be a pain to them also).  There are settings in which the teachers are more fun, including a not-very-strenuous aerobics session, with large, overweight Rocks playing a leading role.  This sequence, coming shortly after Funke’s disappearance but before her children go on the run from ‘social’, does a fine job of showing how a combination of camaraderie and physical exercise temporarily distracts Rocks from her problems at home.  (It brings to mind the ‘Diamonds’ dance in Girlhood (2014) but Gavron’s sequence has more layers of meaning than Céline Sciamma’s.)

Sumaya’s parents have relatives in their house for a family wedding but agree that Rocks and Emmanuel, when they first need a roof over their heads, can stay too.  Although Rocks has confided in her about Funke’s disappearance, Sumaya tries and fails to get her friend to talk more about her feelings, which causes a rift between them:  Rocks angrily reminds Sumaya that, as part of a stable, happy family, ‘you have everything’.  Next day, Rocks truants with Roshé (Shaneigha-Monik Greyson), a brittle newcomer to the school, who boasts about a lucrative scam she’s involved in.  After stealing cash from Roshé, Rocks books herself and Emmanuel into a cheap hotel.  She passes off her brother as her son – plausibly enough – but the hotel manager soon discovers the truth and chucks them out.  The eluding of social services ends while they’re staying at the home of Agnes (Ruby Stokes), a white classmate with whom Rocks goes back a long way.  Like Geraldine, Agnes and her family think they’re doing the right thing by contacting the authorities.  The siblings are taken into care and separated.

The previous paragraph makes this sound a thoroughly miserable story.  Plenty of the praise that has come the film’s way has focused on its celebration of teenage girl friendships and ‘empowerment’.  Although I’m not too sure what that last word means, Rocks really is both saddening and heartening.  It’s heartening not only in the relationships described – Rocks and Emmanuel, Rocks and Sumaya – but as a piece of film-making.   The accolades it has received, in terms of BAFTA nominations, may owe something to right-on thinking but the film itself, as a slice of multi-ethnic London life, is rich and unsentimental.  The cultural distances between the council flats, Sumaya’s parents’ house and Rocks’s several ports of call when she’s skiving school, are succinctly illustrated.  The scene in which she and Emmanuel are told to leave the hotel faces up squarely to the racist invective liable to erupt in such a situation.  Rocks, incandescent and out of control, disparages the British Asian hotel manager as ‘an Indian’.  He responds by telling her ‘you people’ are all the same.  The characters are a mixture of good and bad qualities – no one in the film is just one thing.

Gavron’s generous, nuanced approach is nowhere better demonstrated than in the concluding episode.  By now, Rocks has reconciled with Sumaya – even, tentatively, with Agnes.  Emmanuel is in care in Hastings and Rocks wants to visit him there on his birthday.  She hasn’t the £26 needed for a rail ticket.  Her friends make varying contributions and come up with the money she needs.  A party of six, with just the one ticket, they ignore barriers and the attempts of station staff to stop them boarding the train.  On the journey (where there’s seemingly no ticket check), the girls are exuberant, celebratory.   In Hastings, Rocks leads them to a school playground.  They stand on the other side of the fencing and she spots Emmanuel.  Encouraged to call to him, Rocks watches her brother playing happily with other children and decides not to.  This key change – from what looked set to be a required upbeat finale to Rocks’s mute misery in the scene after she’s seen but not spoken to Emmanuel – is affecting.  Finally, Gavron modifies the unhappy mood with shots of Rocks and the other girls together on the sea front.  You leave the film unsure whether, but hopeful that, Rocks’s recent experiences will let her open up more to friends.

Sarah Gavron gets good work from the whole cast.  Bukky Bakray has a heavy, sometimes truculent gait and fine-tuned emotional expression in her face – the combination is potent and appealing.  Kosar Ali’s Sumaya – skinny, eccentric, quick to notice things – provides a strikingly effective contrast to Bakray, both physically and temperamentally.  As the needy, sparky Emmanuel, D’angelou Osei Kissiedu is full of charm and wit.  It’s no surprise to learn that plenty of the scenes shot by Gavron were improvised.  Just occasionally, this comes through in a slightly negative way:  for example, a conversation between Rocks and Emmanuel, in which he says things and she largely repeats them as questions.  There are moments when Bakray seems too downbeat (and she’s too quiet in a phone conversation with her maternal grandmother in Nigeria).  But I’m nitpicking.  This young actress is a real find.

5 April 2021