Ostalgia : Vera Drake, community and critical spectatorship

Mike Leigh’s film Vera Drake explores the moral complexities of ‘backroom abortions’ at a time when there was no affordable, legal alternative for working class women with unwanted pregnancies. The film also offers a tender evocation of post-war East End life, one that will resonate with those who lived through the privations and poverty of this era - but also its dense family life and networks of mutual support (as evoked rather sentimentally in O’Neill, 1999). As someone born in Canning Town in 1960, Leigh’s complex film sparked some deep feelings that I will use this paper to make some sense of. It depicts characters formed by an urban village moral economy which operated for the most part independently of official regulation and which was comprehensively undermined in the second half of the twentieth century by the forces of economic restructuring, scientific welfare, modernist town planning and bureaucratic rationalism. (Cohen, 1972)