Even fictional films can have an ounce of reality in them. In Andrea Arnold’s Wasp, a creatively engrossing, direct cinema-styled short drama about an impoverished mother’s conflict between her desire and her responsibility, reality almost hits you in the face.
Nathalie Press plays Zoe, a mother who is tying to deal with wanting to be with her ex-flame Dave (Danny Dyer) and taking care of her three young daughters and infant son while hiding them from Dave. All of that and she has to deal with living in poverty without enough food to feed herself and her family. Added together, this all makes a recipe for a lot of stress and a compelling film.
Press’s portrayal of a white-trash mother is so realistic and she is able to show well Zoe’s contrasting characteristics. She is sassy yet troubled, hopeful yet desperate, and caring yet selfish and juvenile. The contradictions shown in her character just enforces that she is human like all of us.
Dyer’s portrayal of Danny and the children in this film help hold the film together as supports for Press’s Zoe. Danny, by the end of the film, proves to be more than just a horny guy by showing compassion to Zoe when he finds out about her children.
The more typical route would be to have Danny as Zoe’s “knight in shining armor” riding on his white horse, but instead he is shown as human, too. He still lives with his mom and has an amusingly hard time starting his car.
The girls in this film also have a maturity beyond their years, especially the oldest one, who is more like the mother, taking care of her siblings and her own mother. They were great in portraying the children’s conflict in loving a mother who can barely take care of them, let alone herself.
As a short film, Wasp excels because of its realism and fast-paced movement. Compared to other short films, like the Savior, The Wraith of Cobble Hill and I Don’t Feel Like Dancing, Wasp moved with a sense of urgency as if it was speeding into a crash that you could not look away from.
This could be immediately seen in the first scene in which Zoe is rushing downstairs with her four children (her baby doesn’t even have a diaper on) to exchange blows with a neighbor over their daughters.
Also, the use of the up-tempo and catchy songs, such as “Hey Baby (If You’ll Be My Girl)” by DJ Otzi, gave the film a silliness and youthfulness that the others did not have. The scene outside the bar when Zoe is dancing to the song with her children radiates that innocence and child-like nature of her character. The audience comes to realize that Zoe is a kid herself with four kids of her own.
Andrea Arnold’s use of Docudrama style is an important element in Wasp that makes the film more authentic and full of anxiety. The hand-held camera creates a grittiness that is similar to other direct cinema or “reality fiction” films, like Woodstock, that have a grainy visual quality to the film. The lighting and shakiness of the film produced an action sequence affect, similar to the ones found in Cops, but with a storyline.
Arnold’s main theme in this film is the universal conflict of desire vs. duty. Everyone in their lifetime has to deal with choosing between what they want to do and what they have to do. For example, people may choose a career they don’t like in order to support their family. Arnold made it realistic enough for people to sympathize with Zoe because we all had that self-centered moment of wanting to give up all responsibilities and go after what we want for once.
Other ideas that the filmmaker emphasizes are the trouble of single mothers to find a man who will accept them and their kids, and extreme afflictions of poverty. Zoe, in the scene when Danny asks her out, feels pressured to tell him that her own kids belong to someone else and she is babysitting. She can barely afford to buy food for her family, feeding them sugar or chips and cola from the bar.
The reoccurring symbol of the wasp in the film brought out a few themes in the film. In one of the first scenes, a wasp is trapped inside the apartment in which Zoe lives resembling the feeling of imprisonment in her situation.
Later in the film, the wasp not only represented a sense of danger when it went into her baby’s mouth, but it was like a leash to tug Zoe back to reality and the need for her to take care of her children (besides letting the cat out of the bag to Danny that she has children).
Even though it is easy to criticize Press’s character in this film, it is more beneficial to watch this film with an understanding of how it can be a mirror into our lives. One of the reasons why this film feels so real and works is that it has themes that we all on a certain level relate to. Sometimes one of the hardest things to do is see the truth in ourselves from what we watch on screen.