BEAUTIFUL HOPES (DS)

BEAUTIFUL HOPES (DS)

London. Shirley and Cyril live together with love and tenderness in their apartment full of cactuses and without bed frames. She would like a child, he does not, because he considers family an outdated concept. And, in fact, the film gives little credit to the institution, giving us a family snapshot, that of Cyril, populated by grotesque figures such as his sister Valerie (in perpetually shocking clothing like the wallpaper that decorates her house) or by the desolate solitude of Mrs. Bender, mother of the two. The main events revolve around the elderly lady and her humble reality, from the confrontation with the glossy bourgeois universe of her neighbors, the Booth-Braines, to the birthday party in honor of her seventy years. A portrait, almost a caricature of Thatcherite London of the late 80s, not without a hint of optimism, with a final glimmer, indeed, of beautiful hopes from Mike Leigh, one of the recognized masters of contemporary English cinema.