In Vera Drake, a new film from the English director Mike Leigh about a back-street abortionist, the moment invariably comes when the title character asks her client to bring her some boiling water.
Vera's affect is so cozy, as nurturing as a maternal bosom, that it's always somewhat of a surprise when you remember that the water isn't for a warming cup of tea, but for the solution she dispenses. That's very much to Leigh's point, since Vera wants nothing so much as to support the frightened, the dismayed and the impoverished who seek her help, who come to this tender dumpling of a woman because they believe they have no other choice.
Set in London in 1950, when abortion in England still existed in a legal gray zone, Vera Drake is Leigh's best work in a decade. Since the release of his splenetic masterpiece Naked in 1993, Leigh has directed four features, the best being Topsy-Turvy, a spiky entertainment about the songwriting team Gilbert and Sullivan.
If the three other features -- Secrets and Lies, Career Girls and the dolorous All or Nothing, an exercise in miserablism verging on self-parody -- were less successful, it is because, like his filmmaking compatriot Ken Loach, Leigh sometimes betrays his art for some political finger-wagging. That the two filmmakers are, of course, often just preaching to the adoring, approving choir makes such grandstanding especially tedious.
There's no such tedium in Vera Drake, which carries the moving dedication, "In loving memory of my parents, a doctor and a midwife," and is suffused with humanity rather than dogma.
In Vera Drake, the politics of abortion isn't a position that individuals can take and leave at will. It's what drives women underground to someone like Vera, with her clucks and smiles, her bar of lye and all that hot water. In this sense, the film's political message isn't really a message, a communique from the filmmaker to his audience (though it's clear where Leigh stands); it's an argument, as much moral as political, that emerges from the characters' real-to-life experiences. That makes Vera Drake ring honest, but what makes it ring true is that it's directed with love and beauty.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
The story opens with Vera (Imelda Staunton) bustling from one grimy corner of London to another. She is happily married to a mechanic, Stan (Phil Davis), and is mother to Sid (Daniel Mays), a cheery tailor, and Ethel (Alex Kelly), a classic Mike Leigh creation hunched over with inarticulate shyness.
When she's not tending to her family, Vera helps sick neighbors and collects neighborhood strays, like the mournful bachelor Reg (Eddie Marsan), whom she tucks into her care. She also works cleaning houses populated by bored wives and pampered daughters who are little more than extensions of the lavish furnishings. It's in one such mausoleum that Leigh casts a sympathetic eye at Susan (Sally Hawkins), a young woman whose class privilege can't protect her from rape.
Leigh's screenplay brings Vera and Susan's lives together, though not in the manner you initially expect. Like parallel lines that never converge, Susan seeks an abortion through the bureaucratic medical system while Vera goes about her daily bustling, humming little tunes, calling everyone "dear" as if she were blowing kisses and occasionally trudging into some anonymous building to meet a distraught, fearful or aloof stranger.
Some of these women look painfully young and are wadded up with terror while others just soldier on and roll their eyes, eager to put the abortion and everything it means behind them. Vera learns about the women from her old friend, Lily (the marvelous Ruth Sheen, from Leigh's High Hopes), who trafficks in other people's grief as casually as she does black-market goods.
With meticulous attention to detail, from the dark, flowered wallpaper in the Drake parlor to the hints of algae-green that give the story a patina of age but not nostalgia, Leigh builds a case for Vera's everyday humanity.
Staunton won the award for best actress at the Venice Film Festival, where Vera Drake was also awarded best film. With her pudding face and tiny frame, Vera looks somewhat like a granny doll, which works brilliantly to Leigh's advantage when the law finally comes calling. (If Sheen had played Vera, the director would have had to work much harder.)
Staunton's physical performance keeps this saintly figure grounded and expands the character, which is helpful as Leigh's resistance to psychological explanation means we really never get inside Vera's head.
In the end, Vera performs abortions simply because, as she repeatedly says, she wants to help other women. With another director, such simplicity might seem like mere calculation or condescension, but here it comes as proof of Leigh's deep feeling for this character, who, after all, does not owe anyone (including us) a reason for why she does what she does.
Leigh's commitment to exposing all the pain the world has to offer, to showing, as Eliot wrote, the skull beneath the skin, is partly what defines him as a filmmaker. But what defines Leigh as an artist are those times, as in Vera Drake, when his conscience and his art shake loose rancor and the filmmaker embraces the possibility of good not just in himself, but in others.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and