The Bookshop

This film was an unexpected pleasure. I'd not read the book but I'd seen the reviews, wanted to see the film, but it disappeared from general release before I managed to catch it.

The presence of Bill Nighy in a film always brings in an audience, although some people are still in recovery from having seen The Limehouse Golem.

Here are my notes:

The Bookshop

UK 2017          113 minutes

Director:          Isabel Coixet

Starring:            Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy and Patricia Clarkson

Awards and Nominations:

• 14 wins including Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Bill Nighy) and Best Actress (Emily Mortimer)
• A further 32 nominations

“The Spanish film-maker Isabel Coixet brings an interesting, unsentimental detachment to this odd tragicomedy of provincial life. She refuses the familiar grace notes of comedy and sugary romance in favour of something more awkward and angular.”

Peter Bradshaw

In 1959 Florence Green (Emily Mortimer), a young widow, decides to risk everything by moving to a sleepy seaside town where she opens its first bookshop. By stocking novels like Lolita and Fahrenheit 451 she opens the eyes of the local residents to the best of modern literature and gains the support of reclusive bachelor Edmund Brundish (Bill Nighy) but her actions incur the wrath of the influential and ambitious Mrs Gamart (Patricia Clarkson) who plans to use the bookshop premises to set up an arts centre. The uncredited narration is by Julie Christie.

The film is an adaptation of Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1978 novel which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The almost twenty year chronological gap between the setting of the novel and its composition allowed Fitzgerald the perspective to create a story driven by the conflict between small town nostalgia fixated on heritage and an emerging metropolitan liberal progressiveness that in terms of bookselling would culminate several years later in the prosecution and acquittal of Penguin Books for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover. However looking at the film at the current moment it is possible to see the story from another perspective, this time political, in that many Brexit supporters espouse a nostalgia for a past that never existed while many Remainers share a liberal and Eurocentric mindset.

Coixet directed the film from her own screenplay, and in an interview about her work to date she declared that she helps “untangle films from their national context, … clearing the path for thinking about national film from different perspectives”; in this case she has changed the perspective of the story by using locations in Northern Ireland to represent Fitzgerald’s fictional Suffolk coastal town. Throughout all her films she identifies recurrent themes of “emotions, feelings, and existential conflict” although both the setting and time in which The Bookshop is set ensured that for this film her characters repress their emotions and button down their feelings.

All of Coixet’s films have a distinct visual style (she works as her own camera operator), she works in both Spanish and English and she has also acted as a producer for films directed by others; as such within Spain she is regarded as a Catalan auteur. She began her career in advertising where her clients included such global brands as BMW, Renault and Ikea before moving into cinema, although continuing to make commercials through her own production company. On its release in Spain The Bookshop received both a positive critical response as well as great public success. The film received it premier outside of Spain at the 68^th Berlin International Film Festival.

Here is the trailer:

Paddington 2

The choice of this film was a unanimous decision by the Committee bolstered by requests from several of our regulars.

We had screened the original Paddington film and that had gone down well.  i had enjoyed it very much but after the reviews for the new film I saw it at the cinema last year and really enjoyed seeing it again: on a second viewing you get a chance to pick up on the incidental detail that passes you by first time around.

It was a good evening - and also very well attended.

Here are my notes

Paddington 2

UK 2017          104 minutes

Director:          Paul King

Starring:            Ben Whishaw, Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins and Hugh Grant

 

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for three BAFTAs – Best Supporting Actor (Hugh Grant), Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay
• A further three wins and five nominations

“This is the follow-up to the first Paddington movie of 2014 and it’s a tremendously sweet-natured, charming, unassuming and above all funny film with a story that just rattles along, powered by a nonstop succession of Grade-A gags conjured up by screenwriters Paul King (who also directs), Simon Farnaby and Jon Croker. Their screenplay perfectly catches the tone of the great master himself, Michael Bond, author of the original books, who sadly died in June this year at the age of 91, creative and productive to the end.”

 

Peter Bradshaw

Paddington is now happily settled in Windsor Gardens with the Brown family. While searching for a present for his Aunt Lucy’s 100^th birthday he finds a unique pop-up book in Mr Gruber’s antique shop, and undertakes a series of jobs to earn money to buy it. However when the book is stolen Paddington and the Brown family have to unmask the thief.

The global success of Paddington (2014) made it inevitable that a sequel would follow and the film reunites the same director and principal cast members, with the addition of newcomer Hugh Grant in a scene-stealing role as Phoenix Buchanan, an ageing actor now reduced to appearing in commercials for dog food. The main characters have come from the books that Michael Bond wrote, and thus the film qualifies for nominations as a “best adapted screenplay”  but, just as in the first film, the screenwriters have produced an original screenplay that nonetheless manages to retain the spirit of the published stories: Michael Bond was partly inspired to create Paddington by his memory of seeing child evacuees with labels around their necks and carrying suitcases as they left London at the beginning of the Second World War, both Paddington and his best friend Mr Gruber (Jim Broadbent) are immigrants and the area of London where the Browns live is, with the exception of Mr Curry (Peter Capaldi), most definitely multi-cultural. It is impossible in the current environment to escape entirely from the long shadow of politics, even in what is ostensibly a children’s film, and thus Sight & Sound was able to lead its rave review of the film with the memorable headline “Brexit, pursued by a bear”.

From an audience approval perspective the film has an approval rating of 100% on the aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes and thus joins an elite and eclectic list which includes established classics such as Bride of Frankenstein (1931), Mary Poppins (1964) and Day for Night (1973). The film also appeared in 18^th place in The Guardian’s list of the best films of 2017.  As a result of the global success of the film the CEO of StudioCanal has confirmed that the studio is committed to making a third Paddington film, although no details have yet been released.
 

The film is dedicated to the memory of Michael Bond, who died at the age of 91 while the film was in production.

Here's the trailer:

 

 

Their Finest

The less "official" work I have to do, the more my day seems to fill up with other urgent matters: hence there is less time for me to keep this blog up to date.

Thus although we have finished our screenings for the Christmas period I am behind with posting my notes, so here we go with the first catch-up session.

Their Finest was my recommendation after having seen it at the cinema. It was good to see that it went down well, I enjoyed it even more at a second viewing and I was delighted to see that Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian has nominated the screenplay as one of the best of the year.

Here are my notes:

Their Finest

UK 2016          117 minutes

Director:          Lone Scherfig

Starring:            Gemma Arterton, Sam Clafin, Bill Nighy, Jack Huston and Paul Ritter

Awards and Nominations

• Nominations for Best Debut Screenplay (Gaby Chiappe) and Best Effects at the British Independent Film Awards
• One other win and one other nomination

“You’d need a heart of stone and a funny bone of porridge not to enjoy this sweet-natured and eminently lovable British film – a 1940s adventure, with moments of brashness and poignancy. It’s all about the love that flowers in the ruins of blitz-hit London and in the dusty offices of the Ministry of Information’s film unit as various high-minded creative types use the magic of cinema to keep the nation’s pecker up.”

Peter Bradshaw

 

During the London Blitz Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) is recruited by the Ministry of Information to write scripts for propaganda films that the public will like, and investigates a story of two young girls who supposedly piloted a boat to help with the evacuation at Dunkirk. The story turns out to be not entirely true but it provides the basis of a feature film that the MoI team decide to make. They cast veteran actor Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy) in a supporting role and as the film goes into production they constantly have to revise the script to meet government requirements, including the unexpected addition of an American character to the beaches of Dunkirk so that the film will help the appeal to the US to join the war on the Allied side.

The film is one of several recent releases – Dad’s Army (2016), Darkest Hour (2017), Dunkirk (2017) and Churchill (2017) – that cover an earlier period in British history which involved certain difficulties relating to events in mainland Europe. Perhaps this focus on Europe reflects current political pre-occupations, although the government’s approach to the Brexit negotiations seems to be far closer to the Home Guard of Walmington-on-Sea rather than to Churchill, as depicted in Darkest Hour, who as a newly appointed Prime Minister in the summer of 1940 used his eloquence to persuade the Cabinet to continue to fighting Hitler and the Nazis rather than seek some form of negotiated settlement; this was the decisive event which saved the country and which Simon Schama has rightly described as “the first great battle of the Second World War”.

In his enthusiastic review of the film Peter Bradshaw focuses on the filmmaking part of the story rather than its historical context and compares the film with Truffaut’s La Nuit Americaine (1973):

“It’s a film unashamedly and cheerfully in love with the conjuring tricks and artifice of cinema. There’s a showstopping matte shot of massed troops on the Dunkirk beach, painted on to glass, and a demonstration of how dubbing and editing can create an illusion of physical presence. Truffaut talked about la nuit americaine – here’s a film about la nuit britannique, a very British kind of film magic. In an earlier scene, Amanda Root plays an actress wearing a hat that recalls Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, and later there’s a scene next to a mocked-up third-class railway carriage.”

Lone Scherfig began her career in Denmark before making her name internationally with the Oscar-nominated An Education (2009). Her subsequent work has included One Day (2011), an adaptation of the novel by David Nicholls, and The Riot Club (2014), a filmed version of Laura Wade’s play Posh.

 Here's a link to the trailer: