Portrait of Kaye review – at home with an agoraphobe, in gently affectionate study
‘Oh fiddle faddle,” mutters Kaye Mannion in the front room of her house in Hackney, east London. Kaye is a cheerful soul in her mid-70s, a chatterbox, an extrovert. She also happens to be agoraphobic; and has been since she was a teenager. In this documentary about her life, Kaye comes over like Miss Havisham crossed with the mother and daughter Edies from Grey Gardens, with a bit of Carry On thrown in. She’s what you might call a character, and the film’s director Ben Reed – one of Kaye’s neighbours – take enormous care in his gentle, affectionate film not to make fun of her or exploit her eccentricities. And sensibly, he keeps the running time to a tight 59 minutes.
Kaye lives in the Victorian terrace she grew up in – long before the gentrification added a few zeros to house prices in the area. Everything is preserved exactly as it was in the 1960s and 70s, down to the floral wallpaper in the front room, and ceiling painted raspberry pink. The place is shabby and rammed with knickknacks, the walls covered with pictures of movie stars and crooners of a certain vintage. When Kaye married a milkman in the 1960s, there was no question of her leaving home – he moved in with her, and her mum and dad. All are now dead.
So Kaye lives with her memories, many of them hoarded on home movies (shot on blank VHS videos her dad used to buy her from Woolworths). Clearly, Kaye is creative, and perhaps in another life she might have been a filmmaker or an artist. But here she is, a curator of her past. And there is something so tender about how precious her childhood is to her; nothing gets thrown away. (She hoots with laughter at the dull entries in her teenage diary: “I did a lovely big load of washing.”)
Reed doesn’t pry too much into Kaye’s phobias or mental health, or a supposed relationship with a younger man called Lorenzo after the death of her husband. Still, there is a delicious sense of bohemian freedom Kaye has enjoyed, living alone in her later years, including taking topless pictures of herself à la Babs Windsor. What a delight.
• Portrait of Kaye is available from 19 May on True Story.