There are working-class heroes and there are unsung heroes. Take Lucy Pardee, the casting director of Rocks and Perfect 10, two of the year’s outstanding British films, both about working-class teenage girls. What Pardee does is traditionally called street casting – finding non-professional actors from backgrounds that don’t usually open doors to a career in the arts. (Her credits include films by Andrea Arnold and Jonathan Glazer).
To assemble the girl squad in Rocks, a gorgeously warm drama about teenage friendship in east London, Pardee went into 14 schools and auditioned 1,300 children. “I literally stood up in front of assemblies and said: ‘You might not see yourself on screen, but we want you.’”
The teenage stars of Rocks are girls you would find on the top deck of a bus in any major city in the UK, but see less of in lead film roles. Yet this year it feels that more stories about working-class lives have made it on to our screens. Is British film finally emerging from what Pardee calls its “posh phase”? “It certainly feels like the balance is starting to be redressed a bit,” she says. “It’s not as far as it could be, should be, but I certainly welcome it.”
Pardee sees part of her job as levelling the playing field for working-class actors. A decade of austerity has reduced opportunities. “It’s completely linked to the youth service, which has been decimated by the Tory government,” she says. “A lot of the avenues into acting that used to exist 15 years ago don’t any more. And drama in school has also been shrunk in many places.”
The director Fyzal Boulifa made his terrifically assured feature debut this year with Lynn + Lucy, a psychological drama about two female friends in their 20s from a council estate in Essex. Boulifa grew up in a similar white, working-class area of Leicester, the son of Moroccan immigrants. He dropped out of school and for a decade plugged away directing short films – working here and there, relying on benefits for long periods, as well as the support of his mother. A reckless strategy, he laughs. “But I don’t have any qualifications. I couldn’t get a job that paid well if I wanted to,” he says. “And I’m from an immigrant family. My parents sacrificed a lot to come to this country for a better life.”
Lynn + Lucy was inspired by a story he read in a newspaper about a young woman vilified by her neighbours after her baby died. What struck me watching it was how much inner life Boulifa has written for his two leads. As a viewer, Boulifa is often frustrated by working-class stereotypes that cinema tends to recycle. “It comes down to two extremes, like the TV show Saints and Scroungers. The characters are either saints or rotten scrounger drug addicts.”
The problem may be that middle-class directors see working-class characters as a problem to be fixed. “There’s definitely such a thing as middle-class liberal guilt, I think. Middle-class film-makers feel they have to be seen to be helping. There has to be an activist component in the films. I think you flatten and simplify the drama by doing that.”
He also wanted to steer away from social realism. Ken Loach’s company Sixteen Films was a producer on Lynn + Lucy, but its involvement was minimal and Loach was not a big influence on Boulifa growing up (“I was more into guys like Alan Clarke”). What Boulifa does share with Loach is a knack for working with first-time, non-professional actors. Roxanne Scrimshaw was working in Lidl when she saw his advert in the Barking and Dagenham Post and auditioned for the part of stay-at-home mum Lynn, who finds herself at the centre of attention after a tragedy. She carries the movie with her extraordinary presence.
Boulifa auditioned professional actors for the part, but often felt a kind of judgment implicit in their performances. “Because it was a working-class character they would come in and slouch in the chair and open their legs.” These are exactly the lazy cliches Lynn + Lucy avoids. As for Boulifia, he looks set to join the cohort of working-class directors who slip through – Arnold, Danny Boyle, Lynne Ramsay, Shane Meadows and Francis Lee – in an industry dominated by privately educated people.
Getting the story right was a big motivation for Henry Blake, another first-timer, whose devastating drama County Lines is still in cinemas. For 10 years, Blake was a youth worker, directing short films on the side. In 2015, he was working at a pupil referral unit in east London with a group of children trafficked by county lines networks. One of his boys went missing for three weeks, during which time his throat was slashed. “Fortunately, he survived,” says Blake. “He was very scared, very distressed, nervous. He said to me: ‘I’ve been in Aberdeen.’”
Blake decided to make a feature about county lines crime. “I thought: if I don’t do this, someone else will and it could be done badly.” He wanted to present the character of a trafficked teenager as an underage victim. “A 14-year-old is a vulnerable child. Sometimes we adultify children – we make them more culpable, more responsible, and that blocks empathy.”
The Scottish director Eva Riley made a standout debut this year with Perfect 10, the tale of a teenage gymnast, Leigh (Frankie Box), who meets her half-brother for the first time. Riley also noticed the boxes into which film-makers tend to put working-class characters. “Sometimes in script meetings there was a sense of wanting something more tragic to happen at the end. I feel like, when you have working-class characters, [the expectation is] someone’s got to die at the end.” Her kids stayed in the picture.
It is too early to tell whether the arrival of these films – to which we could add Ibrahim Miiro’s My Day and Make Up by Claire Oakley – signals meaningful change. Pardee is taking no chances. With other creatives from the crew of Rocks, she has formed Bridge, an organisation to support newcomers into long-term careers in the film industry. “I think this fallacy exists that if people wanted it enough they’d make it happen for themselves. But a huge amount of invisible support exists for more privileged kids, it just does. It’s about going to people and taking those first steps. Doing the work, making it accessible. That’s what we try to do.”
