Chuck Chuck Baby (review) – TIFF 2023

Chuck Chuck Baby is awaiting a UK and International release date.

Who would have thought that a chicken packing factory would play host to the lesbian love story of the summer through a magical mix tape of musical numbers? But that’s precisely what writer and director Janis Pugh offers in her genre-defying ode to love, loss, female friendship, and second chances, Chuck Chuck Baby. Like another enchanting debut feature this summer, Scrapper, Pugh’s film jettisons classic kitchen-sink misery and bathes her love story in bright colours, vivid cinematography and hope while maintaining an engaging emotional core. From the opening scene, Chuck Chuck Baby has no intention of playing by the usual genre rules, and it’s all the better for it.

Chicken packer Helen (Louise Brealey) has a complicated life that offers little satisfaction. She lives with her ex, Gary (Celyn Jones), who shares the house with his new, younger girlfriend Amy (Emily Fairn) and their newly arrived baby. There, she is relegated to living in a small box room while caring for Gary’s loving, supportive, terminally ill mother, Gwen (Sorcha Cusack). Gwen knows that Helen isn’t happy, as do her raucous friends at the packing factory, who struggle to get her to come out of her shell. But when Helen’s old next-door neighbour Joanne (Annabel Scholey) suddenly returns after years away, a ray of sunshine lights up her life. However, can Helen find the confidence to embrace the feelings she kept hidden twenty years before?

On the face of it, Chuck Chuck Baby offers a standard second-chance love story where two women fall in love, unpack their past and attempt to define their future. But Pugh transforms this classic love story into something unique as she creatively dips and dives through several genres. Chuck Chuck Baby is a rom-com, a musical, a coming-of-age flick and a drama.

Musically, Pugh offers a classic mixtape of timeless tracks that morph into lively sing-a-long musical numbers, from Neil Diamond’s “I Am, I Said” to The Cascades “Rhythm of the Rain,” Janis Ian’s sublime “From Me To You.” and Minnie Riperton’s lively “Les Fleurs.” As a result, Pugh’s film carries the same effervescent musical charm as Jonathan Harvey and Hettie MacDonald’s Beautiful Thing. Chuck Chuck Baby wears its working-class, LGBTQ+ colours with pride, offering us a tender and gentle love story that houses several coming-of-age, coming-out themes, demonstrating that this process and the intense feelings attached can happen at any age and often do.

However, Chuck Chuck Baby also has a deep emotional core, underpinned by discussions about female oppression, dreams that evaporated and emotions kept under lock and key in the fear that they may explode. Both Helen and Joanne have suffered physical and emotional pain in their past, with their route to healing held in each other’s arms. The community surrounding them is one where women regularly bring home the bacon, only for men to piss it up a wall. Here, their solidarity, care and love for each other are the only thing that gets them through the hours spent packing chickens in a warehouse full of feathers.

Yet, despite these deep undercurrents, Pugh manages to pull off an atmosphere full of hope. At the heart of this are the beautiful performances of Brealey and Scholey, who appear, at first, to be complete opposites in confidence and character before they delicately open up about their past and their similarities. Equally fantastic is Sorcha Cusack as the dying Gwen, who gently encourages an old love to blossom as the sun sets on her own life.

Chuck Chuck Baby is delightfully different, bold, and charming as two women meet again after a twenty-year absence only to find love among the feathers. It’s a selection box of fresh ideas, a musical mix tape of joy and a celebration of female love and friendship.