Vera Drake
Directed by Mike Leigh.
Cast: Imelda Staunton, Richard Graham, Eddie Marsan, Anna Keaveney, Alex Kelly,
Daniel Mays, Philip Davis
Vera Drake works her way through the streets of London administering good deeds and garnering good will. She empties the bedpan of her aged mother. She fluffs an invalid’s pillow and makes a fresh pot of tea.
"Polly put the Kettle On" time.
Glimpses of the lives of the upper class are captured as Vera cleans and polishes their homes. A young woman on her first date is intimidated and raped. She cannot protest and can only ask an acquaintance for help. She must pass through this, a rite of passage.
1950s modernism, like shards of light, emerges through the marketeering and camaraderie of dismal post-war Britain, ushering in a new social order. Smart worldly women, blonde, brunette and redhead taking charge. Animal skin prints line their coats, no knitted cardigans here.
Vera wears her woollen coat tightly buttoned against the cold and carries a basket. A bonnet clasps her short brown hair. A cup of tea and the ever ready assurance that ‘all will be well’ are her stock responses to the world she encounters. The less said the better.
Her daughter Ethel, without her mother’s sturdy body, hangs to one side, low and slow, but Sid, her son, who works as a tailor, is suave. He wears his black hair slick and side-parted. In the pub, for cigarettes, he trades silk stockings to help men curry favour with the ladies in the dance halls.
Vera’s husband works for his young brother Frank, who is a mechanic and doing well. His wife Joyce declares that she is pregnant, and asks, can she now have her washing machine. Joyce doesn’t like Vera. She thinks Vera is a busybody and that she should mind her own business. But for her husband’s sake, for now, she agrees to visit the family.
Lou Crow
