Riveting character study of a jaded Londoner frittering her life away
Emily Beecham gives what ought to be a life-changing performance in Daphne, as a 31-year-old redhead on the verge of many things. A nervous breakdown? You wouldn’t rule it out. Before we get to that point, she’s definitely on the verge of her next drink, her next bad date, her next embarrassing scene at work, the next late-night takeaway she’d forgotten she’d even ordered.
This unashamedly meandering character study, the excellent debut of Scottish director Peter Mackie Burns, is set in and around east London and knows the milieu inside out. In fact, it’s one of the best films about London living I can recently recall.
An introductory scene has her kissing some random guy she’s just met outside a pub who blows it horribly by trying to snap a selfie “for the lads”. Disgusted more with herself than him, she gives him the kiss-off and calls him a penis. It’s hilarious and cutting, and glues you straight to Daphne as a sort of approachable bit of human wreckage, far too smart not to realise she’s frittering her life away, but often too jaded to care.
She works in the kitchen of a hip restaurant, anxiously run by a husband-and-wife team whose stress levels she rarely helps diminish. Joe (a marvellously rueful Tom Vaughanlawlor) is evidently besotted with her, which his wife, who understandably hates her, can’t help noticing. It doesn’t make for the most calming professional environment. Nor does Daphne’s slapdash cookery. At home, she tests out fish recipes that end up in the bin. Her ailing mother (Geraldine James) pops round uninvited on a near-weekly basis, and they spar with each other acidly.
This is the day-to-day terrain of Daphne, which you fully expect to unfold without much in the way of dramatic incident. It’s kind of a shock, then, when a violent stabbing happens out of nowhere, and nudges the heroine into slightly deeper thought about her place in the world.
Burns and Nico Mensinga, his screenwriter, take a lot of risks in rendering their main character so harsh and often mean, but their gamble is totally justified by everything Beecham does with the role. She doesn’t sentimentalise her damage or crave our pity, or suggest she’s necessarily bothered about reforming this person. There’s genuine strength to her as well as weakness.
Beecham really triumphs with this script. Like Denise Gough’s rather similar character in the West End smash People, Places and Things, Daphne feels like someone you’ve met on a night out and won’t forget in a hurry, partly but not wholly because she was absolutely horrible to you on several occasions. There’s something about her that’s bitingly believable, and just sticks.