Rocks - Curzon Victoria

​The Curzon cinema on Victoria Street was the last cinema I went to before The Great Shutdown, where I saw both Parasite and The Military Wives on the Sunday before the Monday evening when Boris Johnson advised the country to ‘avoid’ pubs, restaurants, cinemas, theatres and so on. So it’s only fair that the first port of call for my ‘return’ was the same place. Central London is still relatively quiet as people continue to work from home, or in my case (and I am far from alone) looking for work from home. And so it was that I shared an auditorium with two other people. Social distancing wasn’t exactly difficult.
 
I can’t relate to the experiences of Shola ‘Rocks’ Omotoso (Bukky Bakray) in Rocks – my childhood was lousy and traumatic in some ways, but it was, relatively speaking, very comfortable compared to what she had to go through. After her single mother Funke (Layo-Christina Akinlude) needs to take some time away from looking after the family home, to sort out her mental health, Rocks is left looking after her younger brother Emmanuel (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu) on her own – with limited funds.
 
Given that they live in a densely populated tower block (there is, apparently, such a thing as a non-densely populated tower block, particularly in prime locations where properties have been snapped up as investment opportunities, such that they are not necessarily occupied, at least not all the time), a concerned neighbour, who hasn’t seen Funke for a bit, calls in social services. Rocks is savvy enough to spot officials outside her front door and manages to evade them. Relying on the benevolence of classmates, the powers that be eventually whisk her and Emmanuel away: her to a local foster home, the boy removed from London to Hastings. That’s social services for you.
 
Nobody can establish where Funke has gone – Rocks calls her grandmother (Shola Adewusi), who lives in Lagos, Nigeria, but her own calls have not been responded to. Funke was, Rocks discovered, let go by her employer, although she kept leaving the house in the morning as though she were going to work. When the film ends the narrative is still unresolved, which makes the film all the more ‘real’: life is messy, life is unplanned, and throws unanticipated curveballs at people.
 
It never rains but it pours – a friendship with Roshé (Shaneigha-Monik Greyson), a new schoolgirl, quickly turns sour in the aftermath of a meetup which exposes Rocks to ‘how the other half live’. Rocks has her reasons to have her defences up, however much her most loyal friend Sumaya (Kosar Ali) tries to lend her support. Fiercely doing everything she can to maintain her independence, Rocks has never stayed in a hotel before. So, she loses her £40 deposit because she didn’t know she had to check out by a certain time and left for school without having packed her bags and leaving them at reception for collection later on. She’s a youngster – one would have thought she would have Googled hotel procedures or something. But she does, to be fair, have other things on her mind. It’s sort of hilarious, at least if your sense of humour is as dark as mine, but also indicative of how much she’s had to grow up, and how quickly.
 
There’s secondary school banter, but Rocks’ classmates are not ones to bear grudges, and things do get a little sentimental after Rocks lets it be known that she wishes to mark Emmanuel’s imminently approaching birthday in a meaningful way. But on the whole, it’s a gripping storyline, and even the worries and concerns of a global pandemic were firmly shunted away for all of ninety-three minutes as I watched this utterly engrossing teenage struggle. It’s an eyeopener: not every schoolgirl is a privileged brat, and some, like Rocks, find themselves in extremely difficult circumstances through no fault of their own. A film that left me counting my blessings.