Exchange of words in British ‘Bookshop’
No film about a bookstore has truly captured the unique magic of some of these hallowed places, and “The Bookshop” does not break that losing streak. But how could a cast featuring Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson and Bill Nighy not raise “The Bookshop,” based on a 1978 novel by Englishwoman Penelope Fitzgerald and directed by Barcelona-born Isabel Coixet, above the level of drab literary soap?
Meet Florence Green (Mortimer), a war widow of several years and new arrival in a cozy English coastal town named Hardborough (the 2017 film was shot in Spain, where it has won several awards). Hardborough is a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business and nothing happens without the approval of the self-crowned queen of the local gentry, Mrs. Violet Gamart
(Louisiana-born Clarkson, whose British accent is as villainous as the character she plays).
Mrs. Green, who is reserved, intelligent and attractive, has renovated a town residence known as the Old House, which no one has wanted to live in for years, to start a bookshop. She and her late husband, whom we see in flashbacks, met in a bookshop, you see.
Florence has also had a dress made for a party at the hilltop manor house of Mrs. Gamart and her dotty husband, Gen. Gamart. To her dismay, however, Florence stands out like Cinderella in her “rust” ensemble amid the glittering gold and silver lame of the upper crust, and before she can gulp her first goblet of Champagne, Mrs. Gamart informs Florence that the Old House should be turned into an “arts center” and not be a bookshop at all.
Thus, the battle lines are drawn in “The Bookshop,” while someone wails some very intrusive and unsuitable songs on the soundtrack score by Alfonso de Vilallonga, whose music for “Blancanieves” (2012) was a lot more fun.
On Florence’s side are a feisty 13-year-old named in neo-Dickensian fashion Christine Gippy (Honor Kneafsey), and the also Dickensian-sounding Mr. Edmund Brundish (Nighy), a widower and recluse living in another manor house, who asks Mrs. Green to “send more Ray Bradbury books” to him and eventually invites Mrs. Green over for tea and greets her at the top of some dusty stairs like a debonair, if also slightly doddering, Count Dracula.
Among the other characters are Milo North (James Lance), whose coiffure recalls one Pepe le Pew, and an evil banker named Keble (Hunter Tremayne). The film’s copious narration, which is provided by an older version of one of the characters, is voiced by the great Julie Christie, also to little avail.