Effi o Blaenau

     An unexpected trip to the Odeon Cinema in Swansea yesterday evening to watch the Welsh language film 'Effi o Blaenau' directed by Marc Evans.  It's all a bit complicated but the script is an adaptation, by the producer Bronwen Cennard, of a one-woman play, 'Ipigenia in Splott' by Gary Owen.  It is based ultimately on Euripides' play 'Iphigeneia in Aulis', but how one gets from Aulis to Splott and then Blaenau Ffestiniog we couldn't work out.  An intellectual leap too far for us - even after having it explained to me via ai it takes some swallowing.*  Anyway, the bf liked it very much but I was circumspect in my praise.  I found it interesting.

     My reservations rested almost solely upon the rather cliched imagery - the shot of the main character laying face up in the bath, the ubiquity of the drone shot.  The inert camera. We've seen enough of them by now.  But then, I suspect, this film isn't about setting out a new direction in cinematography.

     The film opens with Effie and her friends preparing for a night out in Llandudno, getting shit-faced on vodka and perhaps pulling.  All three of them are essentially solipsistic hedonists, living from weekend to weekend.  Perhaps there is nothing else to do in Blaenau Ffestiniog - where apparently is is always winter and always wet, but Snowdonia is not Splott.  The urban landscape, the alienation and the grittiness may always be with us, but the rain is not. We can assume they are unemployed, but they can still find the cash for a Saturday night on the tiles.  Effi is certainly no example of the Jungian individuated person, she is self-regarding and callous.  Here is the Meaning Crisis.  The substance abuse is essentially a search for transcendence.  

     And then something happens and meaning presents itself to Effi.  In fact, it presents itself three times.  The first time in the form of a former soldier, Lee.  Lee has lost his right leg in either Afghanistan or Iraq.  At this point Effi ' has a sort of epiphany and we see her in a different light.  She is shown as kind, softly spoken and loving.  She gathers meaning to herself in his vulnerability. (I thought that perhaps Lee would be her salvation but realised soon enough that it was too early in the film for this to happen.)  Her second epiphany is during her pregnancy, with another vulnerable body to care for.  Finally, for a third time meaning is presented to her, and this time is not snatched away, in the person of her neighbour's young daughter.  It is in the last place she would look, being on her own doorstep, and the offspring of woman she despised.  Each time she chooses to take on responsibility and find meaning there.

     The acting was excellent; the star Leisa Williams very good at eliciting sympathy for an, at times, repugnant character, Effi, without ironing-out her flaws.  The supporting cast too, is very good; credit in particular to Carys Gwilym as Effi's grandmother, and Owen Alun as the hapless Kev.

     It is at times this compelling film is very raw, and some scenes were particularly affecting.  Effi is no mere sacrificial victim.  She makes choices and she has agency, but she is also feckless.  It is all very well for a middle class reviewer in the Guardian, to see this a 'savage indictment' of the system, but Effi's chaotic life is downwind of the extreme bodily autonomy that the Guardian seems keen to promote.  In the end her life gathers some meaning when she becomes friends with her neighbour.  It's that simple.  When we accept to love and care, to take responsibility, we limit our agency.  Whisper it, but this film is quietly conservative.  Could almost have been written by Jordan Peterson.

     I honestly don't think I'd want a return visit to the Odeon.  Before the film there was half an hour of adverts and trailers.  It wasn't so much the adverts we disliked, but the trailers which seemed designed to discourage attendance.  The worst was that for Christopher Nolan's adaptation of the Odyssey, which looked terrible.  On the strength of the trailer, one to miss, I think.

Effi o Blaenau

2026

Producer:               Branwen Cennard

Director:                 Marc Evans

Cinematographer: Eira Wyn Jones

* None of this mythological framework is at all obvious in the film.  Like many will, and have, I came to this film without preparation.  As Lola Salem has recently said in The Critic, "Art is not about diversity, or access, or urban regeneration. It is not about measures that are ontologically extrinsic to it. Art is first and foremost about art, and the artefact owes us nothing".