Effi o Blaenau – painting a bleakly vivid picture of the impact of austerity, Effi o Blaenau should be a star-making turn for Gwenllian (film review)

Minority language cinema is well-represented in Scotland’s exhibition sector. CinemaAttic’s year-round programming makes regular space for films featuring indigenous languages used throughout the Americas, as well as Basque and Catalan productions (their annual Catalan Film Festival is just around the corner). 

This review contains spoilers and discusses potentially triggering plot points.

The patter and politics of the Irish-language Kneecap struck such a chord with GFT audiences that it (ironically) knocked The King’s Speech out of the cinema’s all-time top 10 box office chart. The GFT’s Visible Cinema strand, which caters to deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, regularly features British Sign Language productions. This year’s Glasgow Film Festival played host to, alongside films in Catalan (Forastera) and Gaelic (Salim Nan Daoine), the world premiere of Marc Evans’ Welsh-language Effi o Blaenau.

Set in Blaenau Ffestiniog, a slate-mining town in North Wales where the streets are paved with boarded-up houses and abandoned couches, Leisa Gwenllian plays protagonist Effi, whose hard-partying habits come across as a nihilistic response to the town’s socioeconomic troubles. Effi and her neighbours pay for things, be it a bag of chips to feed a whole family or a bottle of vodka, in loose change, and a night out requires an hour’s train journey to Llandudno. When a one-night-stand leads to an unplanned pregnancy, it further exposes how austerity is leaving people like Effi from small towns like Blaenau Ffestiniog behind.

Cinematographer Eira Wyn Jones frames Effi using wide shots that dwarf her in Blaenau Ffestiniog’s hills and quarries, a choice which lends itself to the idea that Effi’s life is shaped by forces much greater than her. But splashes of Effi’s pink dressing gown against the landscape’s overcast greens, blues, and greys suggest she’s not going to succumb to these forces without a fight.

Gwenllian’s performance adds layers of wounded vulnerability beneath Effi’s stubborn pride, volatile temper, and mischievous sense of humour. When the script occasionally rushes through key dramatic moments, Gwenllian brings a gutsiness and a centre of gravity that rights the imbalance.

The film’s portrait of austerity intensifies during Effi’s pregnancy. Experiencing pain at 28 weeks, Effi is brushed off by overworked maternity ward staff until it’s established that she’s gone into premature labour: Effi now requires a special care bed, the nearest of which are hours away in Aberystwyth and Birmingham and entail either a longer journey or icier roads. With no midwives available to accompany her, Effi’s baby is delivered by paramedics in the middle of nowhere and, in a harrowing depiction of the consequences of an underfunded NHS, doesn’t survive.

This tragedy sees Effi revert to her self-destructive ways while her partner Kev, already imagining the car, holiday, and flat that some compensation money could buy, pressures her to sue. Effi’s eventual decision not to is influenced by a heated conversation with a midwife from the night she went into labour. The midwife tells her any money spent on patient payouts is recouped by making cuts elsewhere, ultimately making it more difficult to save other babies’ lives.

It’s a vicious circle where payouts lead to a shortage of resources, staff burnout, lower standards of care, and poorer health outcomes. The midwife’s attempt to shame Effi goes part and parcel with public messaging that warns about the costs to the NHS of missed GP appointments and unnecessary A&E trips or ambulance callouts.

But blame for the NHS crisis lies squarely with successive Westminster governments’ deliberate programmes of austerity, not individuals who the state has failed in their duty of care and are seeking some form of recompense. A robust and properly-funded health system would be able to absorb these costs.

Nevertheless, Effi’s decision not to sue chimes with her growth from someone who can’t see past the end of her nose to someone who develops a sense of responsibility to her wider community. This is demonstrated elsewhere when she decides against revealing the baby’s father’s infidelity to his wife and in her attempts to repair her relationship with a neighbour.

Evans’ eclectic career across narrative and documentary film has seen him repeatedly circling back to stories about Wales: Patagonia looked at Argentina’s Welsh diaspora; Jack to a King at Swansea City’s fan-led redemption story; biopic Mr Burton at the relationship between actor Richard Burton and the schoolteacher who mentored him.

With its beginnings as a stageplay and its focus on dysfunctional characters in a struggling Welsh mining town, Effi o Blaenau feels like a callback to Evans’ early Cool Cymru drama House of America, swapping out the latter’s post-Thatcher industrial decline for our modern-day cost-of-living crisis. Hot on the heels of eco-horror The Feast and opera film Tanau’r Lloer (which world premiered at last year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival), Evan’s latest joins the growing momentum behind Welsh-language cinema and minority language cinema more broadly.

Painting a bleakly vivid picture of the impact of austerity, Effi o Blaenau should be a star-making turn for Gwenllian.

Effi o Blaenau had its world premiere at Glasgow Film Festival and will be in UK cinemas from 19th June