“The Full Monty” embellished by Donna Summer’s melody, Billie Elliot and its very English charm, and Kenneth Branagh with his war-torn “Belfast“, Britain gave birth to social cinema over a decade ago. While France and the New Wave confined themselves to Parisian bourgeoisie, leaving the beginnings of social cinema to Mathieu Kassovitz, with his rage and “Haine,” and perhaps to Abdellatif Kechiche who has portrayed our society since “L’Esquive“, Britain, traumatized by the Thatcher years and its “Dépossédés“, has always looked at its poor before also Americanizing itself. Andrea Arnold is a survivor of this era and she sketched the condition of women in this milieu with “Wasp“.
Wasp: The Renaissance of English Social Cinema!
The director exclaims with simplicity:
“Dramatically, I like darkness, I like conflict – but I don’t see the world as defined by them. And why would I pretend to? That’s not who I am.”
His short film won an award at the Sundance Festival, the hallowed temple of independent cinema since the film “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” transformed this gloomy corner reserved for connoisseurs into an oracle for a dying cinema.
In “Wasp“, a single mother of four, in a state of significant social neglect, tries to make up for the past with “a date“. The problem is that no one is capable of looking after her four young children. So, from social mistreatment to disillusionment, the single mother gives it a try. She takes her children to the Pub and leaves them at the door.
Britain is often associated with the City, finance, triumphant freedom, and resistance. But since experiencing ultraliberalism in the 1970s, cinema, photography, and literature have pointed fingers at the victims of these revolutions. Also, at a time when bourgeois feminist revolution triumphs with #MeToo, what can be said of these women whose main mistreatment is social, or who live under the patronage of a husband who has all the rights over them?
