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Calendar Girls
**
Cinema
Review - October 7, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 12A. UK.
108 minutes. Directed by Nigel Cole. Produced by Nick Barton, Suzanne Mackie.
Written by Tim Firth, Juliette Towhidi. Starring Helen Mirren, Julie Walters,
Penelope Wilton, Celia Imrie, Linda Bassett, Annette Crosbie, Ciaran Hinds,
John-Paul McLeod, John Alderton, Geraldine James, Philip Glenister, Marc
Pickering.
It's all about Helen Mirren. Fine and foxy and
oh-so dreamalicious, that's what Helen Mirren is. She's fifty-eight years
old, but still in great shape, and she carries a fiery glow, something that
cuts through the stillness of everything around her and casts the mind into
daydreams about exchanging respectfully provocative whispers over glasses
of good wine.
I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. And watching
Helen Mirren carried me through a lot of "Calendar Girls",
which is sometimes a fun movie, sometimes a stupid one, but never drifts
far from Mirren. The director, Nigel Cole, wants to keep things ever so slightly
this side of bland and obvious. He wants to make a risqué movie --
benign and sheepish, but kinda risqué all the same. Mirren has
respectability these days, on top of great talent and that liberated, rebellious
sort of charm. With her as his lead, Cole can cover the base of credibility
and still make a work of geriatric safeness.
Because, you know what type of movie this will
be before you even go in. It's the easiest type of Britflick to make successful,
an all-smiles crowd-pleaser that follows the "Full Monty" formula and gets
the middle-aged all excited. There will be a transparent mix of sadness and
laughs, with jokes that flirt with sexual innuendo -- to an extent that would
make your mother laugh and throw a guilty smile at the naughtiness of it
all, but never actually gamble at specialised humour or anything that could
be called offensive.
Some of these movies work. "The Full Monty" was
a masterpiece, I think, and Cole's own "Saving Grace" had enough little surprises
to let me call it good and not feel like a sap. "Calendar Girls" has the
right kind of story for a movie that could get a passing grade -- it's about
a bunch of ladies from the Rylstone Women's Institute, who in 1999 posed
for a nude calendar to raise money for the local hospital after one of their
husbands died from leukaemia. Nude, but with their naughty bits covered up
by objects, while they went about such typical WI activities as jam-making
and flower-arranging. The project would be pointless if it didn't have a
wink about it.
There are a lot of laugh-out-loud moments early
in the film, as the women bicker amongst themselves and wonder whether they're
doing the right thing and get all embarrassed about taking off their clothes.
But the laughs drift away, and the flaws stick, like the ridiculously nervous
photographer who comes on board for the shoot. Dilemmas that get blown out
of proportion for manufactured drama, like when Mirren's husband gets misquoted
in the tabloids or her son gets arrested for smoking oregano. And there are
moments that are desperate for a laugh, because Cole and his screenwriters
don't really know how to do this story justice.
Look at the scene where the girls are about to
go off to America, where publicity about the calendar has spread. They're
in the airport. The girl behind the desk says there's something wrong with
their tickets. Everyone pauses suspensefully, and Julie Walters gets in a
strop about how they're supposed to be booked on the flight, and this is
ridiculous, and they need to get on that plane. And then -- huzzah!
-- the girl smiles! The heroes are not to worry, she says, and their tickets
were only incorrect because they've been moved to first class!
There's a lot of stuff like that. And we never
get to see the original calendar, not even in the end credits. And because
the filmmakers are busy sticking to formula, very little screen time is spent
on the photo shoot, where much of the real humour and emotion was probably
laid bare, in terms that could easily have been cinematic. And the drama
in the closing passages is a debate about staying focused on the meaning
of the project, rather than getting greedy or becoming wowed by fame -- ironic,
in a movie so happy to exploit real life for cheap and easy
commerce.
"Calendar Girls" places itself in a tradition
of films that are fairly easy to make, looks like it's doing a professional
job and still ends up failing. It goes on too long, misfires too lamely and
doesn't really know the heart of its own story. But at least there's Helen
Mirren.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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