Mourning Glory

MOURNING GLORY by Nathan Hughes - 1 page synopsis. “...the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.” Mourning Glory is a contemporary dark comedy about an emotionally constipated man, stuck in his bleak Welsh hometown after his mother’s death. When his best buddy gaslights him into a fateful scheme to help a misfit escape small-town Wales, he discovers that making amateur porn is powerful grief therapy. The consequences compel three lost souls to confront their authentic selves. Having failed to secure any conventional signifiers of wealth and status, uptight porn addict AL (40), is at existential year zero. After a painful summer watching his mother succumb to ovarian cancer, he must now prevent his combustible, ex-Hell’s Angel brother MARCO (45), from displacing his grief on reckless drug dealer GAV (28), and also persuade the local council to let him live in his mother’s council house. AL’s hometown stay provokes a deep re-evaluation of his cultural identity, and he fears that losing the family home will cut an umbilical connection to his beloved Pembrokeshire. Streetwise, impulsive MEG (26) yearns to follow her idol, Welsh porn star Gail Maze, to a new life of glitz and glamour in L.A. Raised by an unstable single mum, she masks the psychological scars of adverse childhood events with trash-mouth bravado. To escape Wales, she needs a hot scene to attract the adult industry’s attention, but her funny cum-face does not fit the pornified parody of female sexuality that it demands. MEG asks her Polish buddy AGA (30), a sharp-tongued amateur photographer who she works with in an old people’s home, to help her perform a sexy camera face. AL’s feckless filmmaker buddy MUFF (40) visits to lend immoral support. AL’s modest goal is to enjoy a stress-free week cruising Pembrokeshire’s wild Atlantic coast in his vintage Audi. MUFF, beguiled by his newfound birth-mother’s story, that as a foetus in her womb, he ‘told her’ not to jump off a cliff, hopes that making a film about it will boost his career. AL orders MUFF not to upset the locals, but MUFF intuits that AL needs to purge his blocked grief, and he vows to facipulate it. Opportunity knocks when MUFF meets MEG, who brokers a quid pro quo deal to shoot her scene in exchange for playing MUFF’s suicidal teen mum in his film. MUFF pressures AL to be her co-star by warning that if he refuses, when his life highlights reel flashes through his mind at the moment of death, it will be boring. Timid AL’s reluctance is overcome by his attraction to earthy MEG and her ruthless pursuit of destiny, but a brutal encounter with her ex (drug dealer GAV), terrifies him. MUFF captures video evidence that enables MARCO to unleash cathartic vengeance on GAV. This allows their amateur porn shoot to proceed, but MUFF’s cinematic pretentions and MEG’s fake stars and stripes nails provoke AL’s humiliating emotional breakdown. Despite AL purging his grief, the men’s relationship is on the rocks until MEG’s demand that MUFF honours their deal, offers a last stab at redemption. MEG takes control and the second shoot is an unexpected triumph despite AL’s precious Audi going up in smoke. When a stray firework fells ecstatic MUFF, AGA’s intuitive female gaze captures MEG’s orgasmic epiphany - that authenticity is always sexier than faking it to make it. This poignant coming of age story counterpoints bittersweet male/female friendships to get down and dirty with stoic masculinity and the normalisation of porn. It riffs on tragicomic treatments of grief (Fleabag, After Life), and exuberant ensemble classics (Sideways, The Big Lebowski, Twin Town, Rita, Sue and Bob Too); to ask what it takes to be authentic in a cynical world of superficial values.