Chuck Chuck Baby (2024, dir. Janis Pugh)

by Jack Martin | Jul 16, 2024

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 102 mins

UK Distributor: Studio Soho Distribution

UK Release Date: 19 July 2024

WHO’S IN CHUCK CHUCK BABY?

Louise Brealey, Annabel Scholey, Sorcha Cusack, Celyn Jones, Emily Fairn, Edyta Budnik, Cat Simmons

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Janis Pugh (director, writer), Anne Beresford, Peggy Cafferty, Andrew Gillman and Adam Partridge (producers), Sarah Cunningham (cinematographer), Rebecca Lloyd (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A put-upon woman (Brealey) gets a new lease on life when her crush (Scholey) returns…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON CHUCK CHUCK BABY?

Although writer-director Janis Pugh’s Chuck Chuck Baby is being explicitly labelled as a musical, that doesn’t mean that it necessarily is one – at least, in the traditional sense. It’s much more of what I like to call a “sort-of-musical”, as in that it’s a musical… sort of.

Allow me to elaborate a bit further. The film, like your average jukebox musical, contains many sequences set specifically to a range of popular hits, in this case tracks by the likes of Neil Diamond, Janis Ian and Julie Felix among others, all within a narrative crafted meticulously around them. However, nobody is exactly bursting into extravagant all-singing and all-dancing routines in Chuck Chuck Baby. Instead, the singing is that realistic kind where characters are quietly vocalising along with the actual songs as they play in the diegetic background, and any choreography is largely restricted to lightly playful movements among the players.

It carries all the elements of a typical musical without ever completely becoming one, which is only part of what makes this film a rather interesting, and emotionally heavy, one to experience.

Set in a remote town in North Wales, the film follows a woman named Helen (Louise Brealey), who when we meet her is living a less than desirable existence. She’s shacking up with her lazy, good-for-nothing spouse Gary (Celyn Jones), who’s just had a baby with his vapid younger girlfriend Amy (Emily Fairn), with her own source of love and support coming from Gary’s dying mother Gwen (Sorcha Cusack). She is also working tireless night shifts at the local chicken packaging factory – which is where the title Chuck Chuck Baby comes from – and is forced to hand over half her payment to her unemployed husband. It is, to put it bluntly, a rubbish life that Helen leads.

Her spirits are lifted, though, upon the unexpected arrival of her childhood crush Joanne (Annabel Scholey), who has returned to sort through the home of her abusive father, who’s just died. Both Helen and Joanne manage to rekindle their former spark, but in a closed-minded community such as theirs, it’s not long before their happy reunion threatens to come to an end before it even gets started.

All the “sort-of-musical” stuff aside, Chuck Chuck Baby does manage to carry a powerful sense of emotion that often doesn’t need music to further set the mood. Pugh adopts a melodramatic kitchen sink realist approach to her direction, with its working-class characters engaging in enough conversation and shouting matches with one another to rival the hostility of an average EastEnders episode, but the filmmaker avoids condescension by giving many of these figures, even the more unsympathetic ones, some tender moments to let their deeper issues bubble to the surface. A sprinkle or two of magical realism is also thrown in for good measure, like an opening shot wherein a floating ball of dandelion seedheads glides across the way like the feather in Forrest Gump, an effect clearly achieved by invisible rope rather than CGI, which momentarily creates a nice otherworldly feel before the grounded drama kicks in.

Pugh’s script frequently mines the sweetness of her story from its warm and charming centre, without sacrificing many of its rougher edges. Through a simple if somewhat conventional narrative, Pugh presents the central romance between Louise Brealey’s Helen and Annabel Scholey’s Joanne as an evenly weighted affair where both lovers have their equal amounts of issues to deal with, which both actors strongly convey with a tenderness that draws out their passion as well as their underlying vulnerability. It’s a romance that is easy to get behind, and you are rooting for both of them – especially the isolated and bullied Helen, who has to frequently endure the boorish torment of Celyn Jones’s emotionally damaged antagonist – to ignore the blatant prejudices around them and achieve their inevitable happy ending.

The unusual approach to its musical sequences form moments that are among the most powerful in the movie, for again Pugh has carefully curated a set of songs that underscore the emotional drama, and in some cases even comment on the narrative at large, while filming them in an intimate close-up manner reminiscent of Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables. They are performed with earnest feeling by the actors who, thanks to the benefit of not worrying too much about their vocals (the songs are performed live, as in both Les Misérables and Alan Parker’s The Commitments), are free to embed their dramatic brevity into the way that they sing along to these heartfelt and sometimes uplifting tunes. It is one of the more original jukebox musicals in recent memory, because not only is the execution as unshowy as they come, but the songs themselves actually have a purpose in providing that overwhelming sense of emotion.

Narratively, it doesn’t completely go against the tide, but Chuck Chuck Baby represents an intriguing and easily lovable alternative to the traditional jukebox musical, one that embodies the full “sort-of-musical” mentality in all its sort-of glory.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Chuck Chuck Baby is an engaging and uplifting, if somewhat conventional, romance where you feel the deep emotion of its central love story, which is told via a slight shake-up of the traditional jukebox musical model that lends it a unique voice among that crowd.