Narrative
Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the present with a passionate, compassionate and often darkly humorous study of family and the thorny bonds that bind us together. The incredible Marianne Jean-Baptiste, reuniting with Leigh for the first time since the multiple Academy Award-nominated Lies and Secrets, stars as Pansy, a woman racked by fear and wracked by grief and angry tirades against her husband, her son and anyone who looks at her. Meanwhile, her quiet younger sister, played by Michele Austin (“Another Year”), is a single mother whose life is as different from Pansy’s as their differing temperaments – she exudes communal warmth from both her salon clients and her daughters. This sweeping film from a master playwright introduces us to the intensity of kinship, duty and that most enduring of human mysteries – that even in a life of pain and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.