REVIEWED - GYPO: OVER the last two decades we have been exposed to Pauline McLynn the novelist, the radio satirist, the comical housekeeper, the Shakespearean shrew, the television panellist and - I may be making this up - the heart surgeon. But McLynn's considerable talents as a serious actor, honed as a founder member of Rough Magic, have been under-utilised of late.
Gypo, a grim slice of English social realism made according to the dicta of the Dogme movement, is by no means a perfect film. Some of the scenes of familial strife are protracted to a wearisome degree. The attempts to engage with a hot issue of the day occasionally come across as schematic. But Jan Dunn's debut, made for the price of a pint and a bag of peanuts, utilises an ingeniously worked structure and features deeply felt, complex performances from Paul McGann, newcomer Chloe Sirene and, most impressively, McLynn herself.
The former Mrs Doyle plays Helen, a mother (and, gosh how the years scurry by, grandmother) trying to hold together a warring family in working-class Margate. The film's several interweaving plots are triggered when Kelly (Tamzin Dunstone), the daughter of the family, brings home her new friend (Chloe Sirene), an immigrant from the Czech Republic, for a spot of supper.
Kelly's unhappy father, played with sinister introversion by McGann, barks out paranoid racist gibberish at his stoic guest before mouthing the insult that gives the film its title. Later Helen becomes close to her daughter's pal while her husband grudgingly takes on an Iraqi immigrant to assist him in his failing business. Good and bad things follow.
Dunn's key innovation is to tell the story three times over, from the perspective of mother, father and immigrant. As well as offering the viewer a diverting intellectual sideshow, this permits insight into the sometimes obscure motivations of the principals.
Still, for all its twisty cleverness, most viewers will savour Gypo for McLynn's achievement in creating a warm, fleshed-out character whose pathological need to care brings her as much grief as solace.
Oh, and Rula Lenska's in it too.
