Lynn + Lucy

Public screenings
7^th October 2019 6.00pm at Empire Haymarket
8^th October 2019 3.15pm at ICA Cinema

Lynn and Lucy have been best buds since “big school”. However, Fyzal Boulifa’s latest feature, Lynn + Lucy, focuses on a period years later, as the weight of motherhood, trust and community painfully crushes their once untouchable relationship to dust.

A thick smog of dissatisfaction smothers their working-class town and seeps into the houses of its residents. Lynn (Roxanne Scrimshaw) has been a stay-at-home mum since she got pregnant at 16. Lucy (Nichola Burley) hasn’t changed much either, maintaining her reputation as a blue-haired, unkempt party girl. A decade down the line, they both experience a shift in their place in the world. Lynn has just started a new job at a hair salon and Lucy has just had her first child. However, when Lucy’s newborn suddenly dies, the suspicious community rounds up to point fingers, divvying out a hefty slice of shame and blame towards the parents.    

The director’s choice of a 4:3 aspect ratio emulates the claustrophobia of the small town. Likewise, the steady flash of gossip magazines in the characters’ hands and the reality TV buzzing in the background make the world a tight microcosm of a status-driven and class-divided society. Though Boulifa zeroes in on the central fractured friendship, Lynn + Lucy scrutinises the lengths we go to satisfy our craving to belong within the community.

The women’s relationship is never seen in its heyday. Instead, their decade-long love is understood through the community’s judgmental quips about what they used to be like. Ironically, it is this terse and scathing language, reduced to words of suspicion, which rips their friendship apart. The slight cracks in their relationship splinter relentlessly in the course of this restrained but scathing film. 

Boulifa’s fluid camera movements forge a soft line which confidently delineates and offers no judgement on characters keen to judge one another. Lynn and Lucy have been wrung out by the world, but they equally participate in spewing nasty comments about others. The many close-ups illuminate the slightness but unyielding tenacity of both leading ladies’ performances. Lynn + Lucy stands as an intimate portrait of community and loss – and the fact that some storms are too strong for love to weather.

Mary-Catherine Harvey

Lynn + Lucy does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews and interviews from our London Film Festival 2019 coverage here.

For further information about the festival visit the official BFI website here.

Watch a clip from Lynn + Lucy here: