Song for Marion

It's the opening night of our new season tonight.  Traditionally we have chosen something popular to pull in the punters and persaude them to sign up to the rest of the season and tonight we are screening Song for Marion.

I know the film received good reviews, but it did not appear too high on my "to see" list - unlike Cloud Atlas which I cannot wait to see - but I'm prepared to be open-minded.

Here are my notes:

Song for Marion

UK 2012                      93 minutes

Director:                      Paul Andrew Williams

Starring:                        Vanessa Redgrave, Terence Stamp, Anne Reid, Christopher Ecclestone, Gemma Arterton

Awards and Nominations

• Three nominations at the British Independent Film Awards for Screenplay (Paul Andrew Williams), Best Actor (Stamp) and Best Supporting Actress (Redgrave)
• Winner of Audience Choice Award at the Nashville Film Festival

“This is a sweet-natured, charming, if modestly conceived picture, which is much better than Dustin Hoffman's recent oldie-song drama Quartet – more relaxed, more persuasive, and it actually delivers the all-important musical climax that Hoffman somehow managed to omit.”

Peter Bradshaw

Marion (Vanessa Redgrave) and Arthur (Terence Stamp) are a long-married lower-middle-class couple.  Although she is terminally ill she is an outgoing member of a local choir (“the OAPz”) run by a young music teacher (Gemma Arterton ), while he refuses to join the choir and is alienated from their son (Christopher Ecclestone).

Both Redgrave and Stamp started their film careers in the early 1960s and starred in some of the most iconic films of the era including A Man for All Seasons (1966) Blow-Up (1966) and Camelot (1967) for Redgrave and Billy Budd (1962), The Collector (1965) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) for Stamp although since then it has been Redgrave who has had by far the more illustrious career both in terms of the films she has made and the quantity of nominations and awards she has received. 

 Paul Andrew Williams made his name with London to Brighton (2006) a brutal thriller that Peter Bradshaw regarded as one of the best British films of the last decade and for which he received a BAFTA nomination for the Most Promising Newcomer in 2007.  He followed this by The Cottage (2008) and Cherry Tree Lane (2010), both of which were also thrillers.  Thus Song for Marion reflects quite a change to his work to date, and is the result of a new joint development programme funded by Pathe and BBC Films.

Here's the trailer: