Usually I write reviews straight after the event; my ideas slip like water through my fingers and I just need to get it all down. Lollipop was different, I have mulled over this film for weeks and it keeps coming back to me. I saw it in London, unfortunately it only came to Oxford at the UPP for 2 nights over a heatwave and I heard that sadly the audience wasn’t that big (secret tip, going to a cool, dark cinema when it is over 30 degrees is actually a brilliant idea). Lollipop is truly a breath of fresh air.
Lollipop is the first fiction feature of Daisy May Hudson, a young film maker with her own lived experience of being homeless, having made a personal documentary about this, which I am looking out for, called Halfway (2015). Lollipop tells the story of Molly (Posy Sterling) who is released from prison and intends to return to her children who have been temporarily placed in foster care while she was away, but then finds herself homeless and unable to look after them. As she summarises at the council housing office: “so you won’t give my children back because I don’t have anywhere to live, and you won’t give me anywhere to live because I don’t have my children”.
Lollipop is made up of a non-professional and (with the exception of a small boy) only female cast. I found this particularly poignant when I read that the housing and social care professionals in the film are all played by people who have had their own experience of being on the receiving end of those services. Depressingly, that probably explains why, with the exception of one pregnant social worker at the end giving some fairly candid home truths, they are depicted as almost exclusively faceless and only able to let people down. There is a heavy use of those meaningless phrases like “I understand this is difficult for you” which seem inevitably to wind people up. As someone who works in this field, I vow never to say that again. Some of these interactions would be a good education in *how not to do* effective de-escalation. However, the blame isn’t laid at individuals’ feet and it clearly articulates how this is a maddening systemic failure.
Despite the heaviness of the topic, Lollipop is also a joyful celebration of women’s strength and female friendship. It manages to toe a a careful line between not shying away from the dire situation this country seems to be in, but also recognising the humanity of individuals who still smile, laugh and do silly things. This isn’t done in a sickly sweet way, Molly’s daughter Ava (Tegan-Mia Stanley Rhoads) reads out a letter in court which alongside her love for her mother also acknowledges all the mistakes she has made. Both the older girls in this film, Ava and Maia (Aliyah Abdi) show the complexities of somewhat traumatised children, both showing clear signs of “adultification” which does justice to real life.
Lollipop highlights a ridiculous catch-22 issue. Women can only claim housing benefit for up to 13 weeks while they are in prison and Universal Credit housing element for up to 24 weeks. This means that anyone living in social housing with a sentence of only more than 3-6 months will inevitably have to give up their property, let alone the issues around leaving it empty. This means that single mothers who have voluntarily agreed for their children to go into foster care under Section 20 will almost inevitably be unable to have them back as they won’t have suitable accommodation. Therefore judged as “single people” by the housing system (completely ignoring the fact they have a family), they will be only able to bid for one-bedroom properties. Given that there is a huge question as to whether women should even be in prison in the first place, that they make up only 4% of the prison population and that 60% of their sentences are under 6 months (Prison Reform Trust), this seems a solvable issue for a very small number of people but which has a devastating impact. I, for one, will be writing to my MP.