Putting the glaze on a pottery pioneer
The Colour Room
PG Cert, 107 min ★★★★
Dir: Starring:
Afeel-good gloss has been deftly applied to The Colour Room, a self-consciously uplifting biopic of pioneering pottery designer Clarice Cliff that aims to do for jazz-age ceramicists what Downton Abbey did for country piles. Directed with vigorous zing by Claire Mccarthy, the film presents Cliff ’s story as a sort of Pretty Woman in the Potteries.
This is partly attributable to Claire Peat’s screenplay, which anachronistically frames Cliff as a Girl Boss leaning in as she conquers the staid world of inter-war crockery. However, most of the sparkle emanates from Bridgerton’s Phoebe Dynevor. As
Cliff, she brings a Hollywood dazzle to what could have easily been a tale of flat-capped misery beneath the belching smoke-stacks of 1920s Stoke-on-trent.
Cliff really was a revolutionary designer, though oddly the true scale of her achievements – her “bizarre” collection eventually clocked up nearly nine million in sales – is explained only in historical voiceovers during the end credits. The Colour Room is more concerned with Cliff ’s Billy Elliot-esque struggles as a young woman (her mother disapproves of her pottery ambitions; her sister suffers a caddish fiancé and ill health). And with her romance with her dashing boss, Colley Shorter (Matthew Goode).
The film’s glaze turns a bit flaky when you consider that Shorter, again a real-life figure, was happily married when Cliff came on the scene. This awkward fact is acknowledged, though it doesn’t get in the way of portraying Cliff and Shorter’s romance as entirely wholesome, his wife an unfortunate background distraction.
Nor does the presumably gritty reality of working-class life in 1920s Stoke get much of a look in. Huge computer-generated bottle kilns are depicted filling the air with smog. But whenever Dynevor is on screen, the sunlight catches swooningly on her rather modern clobber (she looks more like the front-woman of an up-and-coming indie band than a pioneering designer).
Despite the occasional smashed plate – and one or two close encounters with mortality – The Colour Room wends its way towards a predictably triumphant ending. Hired by Shorter as his factory’s only female “modeller”, Cliff is spurred towards greatness by the support of a kindly art director (David Morrissey). The biggest obstacle to her dreams of pottery super-stardom is the patriarchy, but her solution is to ignore the men. Instead, she appeals directly to their wives and daughters by advertising in magazines. And by having her female employees stage live paint-a-longs in shop windows (“Colour Room” refers to the chamber where female “paintresses” would hand-paint crockery, and where Cliff started her career).
Cliff ’s story has a genuine fairy-tale quality. And she obviously beat the odds in advancing from factory floor to international renown. Even so, it’s hard not to suspect Mccarthy is laying on the positivity a bit thick, while the camera can’t get enough of Dynevor’s thoroughly modern pout and trendy hair. And yet, for all the contrivances, it’s hard to deny The Colour Room’s charms.
Ceramics are cold to the touch and shatter easily – but this film is gooey and generous and sure to impart a warm glow.
In cinemas, on Sky Cinema and NOW TV from today