(Bill
Nighy)
This is a small gem of a movie that could
easily fly under the radar here. (Review by Patrick Compton - 9/10)
On the face of it, The Bookshop could be seen as another example of nostalgic English
heritage cinema as a widow moves on from an old sorrow to realise a lifetime’s
dream of owning her own bookshop.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Perhaps this adaptation of Penelope
Fitzgerald’s novel needed to be made by an outsider, and Spanish director
Isabel Coixet is certainly that. Set in the Suffolk seaside town of Hardborough
in 1959, what could have been a cosy post-war drama becomes a quietly savage dissection
of small-town life.
Coixet, who also wrote the script, makes
her mark in the first major sequence when widow Florence Green (a sympathetic
Emily Mortimer) is invited to a drinks party given by local bigwig Violet
Gamart (Patricia Clarkson). But instead of a gathering to welcome her to the
village, and support her worthy enterprise, it’s immediately clear that the
battle lines are already being drawn up.
Florence has bought a rundown old house on
the outskirts of town that she plans to turn into a bookshop, the dream of a
lifetime. The envious, malicious and icy Gamart, who wants to turn the house
into an arts centre, immediately begins a campaign to get rid of the
interloper.
Coixet’s style cuts to the bare bones of
the drama in which the town is revealed as a seething nest of gossip, malice
and backbiting – precisely the kind of people who you’d imagine would vote
“leave” in the current Brexit debate.
The courageous and honourable Florence has
only two real friends, the understandably reclusive Edmund Brundish (the
inimitable Bill Nighy), and a sparky young girl, Christine (Honor Kneafsey),
who helps out at the bookshop.
Set against them are long list of local
nasties, led by Mrs Gamart and the oleaginous BBC producer Milo North (James
North), and also including her bank manager and lawyer. Almost everyone, it
seems, wants to queer Florence’s pitch.
Coixet’s spare dialogue and the studied
pace of the movie work particularly well with the silences either emphasising
the lack of communication – and empathy – between the characters, or of ramping
up the intensity of emotion. In this world of malice, envy and
class-consciousness, the warm and increasingly affectionate relationship
between the two book-lovers, Florence and Mr Brundish, stands out like a beacon
of glowing humanity, underlined by the movie’s most powerful sequence as the
pair meet on a windswept beach.
It’s also significant that this movie,
which also serves as a love letter to book readers, chooses two novels in
particular to foreground, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit
451.
Visually, the film is a treat with director
of photography Jean-Claude Larrieu initially portraying the town as a
picturesque space, but as the emotional temperature plunges towards freezing, familiar
images take on an increasingly sinister aspect.
The
Bookshop is currently showing at Gateway and
Watercrest Mall. – Patrick Compton
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