Ecstasy

Jean works in a garage and consoles herself with drink and perfunctory sex. Jean's insistent neighbour Dawn and Dawn's Irish labourer husband, Mick, and Mick's spineless mucker, Len, all join her in a funny, drunken, sad celebration of their mutual affection and bleak lives. Through a wealth of casually dispensed personal detail and characterisation of astonishing intensity and nuance, "Ecstasy" cheerily bares the soul of a society on a precipice. This is vintage Leigh and Ecstasy is at times as screamingly funny as Abigail's Party, at others as touching and true as Secrets and Lies and Vera Drake.