OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR FILM
Gemma Arterton leads a cracking cast in this witty, poignant tale of Britain’s finest hour
FOR a Dane, director Lone Scherfig has a remarkably keen eye and ear for the intricate details of British class and period.
her 2009 feature An Education wonderfully evoked suburban London in the Sixties, The Riot Club (2014) went to town on badlybehaved Oxbridge toffs, and now here’s Their Finest, a beguiling romantic not-quite-comedy set in 1940.
Like An Education, which was based on the memoir by journalist Lynn Barber, Their Finest has also sprung from a book, in this case a novel by Lissa Evans about the making of a propaganda film thinly disguised as a drama, at the height of the Blitz.
And like An Education, except more so, the story is, above all, about a particular young woman asserting her place in a world ruled by men. This is the engaging Catrin Cole (charmingly played by Gemma Arterton), not a radiant English rose but a sunny Welsh daffodil, who has arrived in wartime London from Ebbw Vale with struggling artist husband Ellis (Jack huston).
She is a talented copywriter, who goes for an interview with the Ministry of information for what she thinks is a secretarial job. in fact they want her to craft ‘women’s dialogue’ for their propaganda features.
The contemptuous film-industry word for female chatter in such films is ‘slop’ (in reality it was more commonly known as ‘nausea’), and we are left in no doubt by Gaby Chiappe’s script, which just occasionally errs on the heavy-handed side, that ministry women are third-class citizens.
The one female who has risen in the ranks is a rather butch lesbian (improbably yet nicely played by the decidedly non- butch Rachael Stirling). But Catrin finds herself firmly at the bottom of the heap.
‘Obviously we can’t pay you as much as the chaps,’ she is told by her pompous new boss, played, or rather over- played, by Richard E. Grant.
On the whole, Chiappe — an experienced TV writer (Lark Rise To Candleford, Shetland, The Level) here making her feature-film debut — does a lovely job of weaving Catrin’s doughty career progress in with her burgeoning feelings for screenwriting colleague Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin).
Conveniently, Ellis turns out to be rather a rotter, whereas Buckley, beneath his sneery, superior air, is a decent sort of cove, with a matineeidol smile. THEIR project, one designed not only to repair morale left in tatters by the Luftwaffe, but also to persuade the Americans to come to the aid of the plucky Brits, is a film based on a newspaper story about heroic twin sisters from Essex.
Catrin is despatched to Southend to get the sisters’ story; how they borrowed their father’s rickety fishing boat and braved the Channel to rescue troops trapped at Dunkirk. Never mind that it isn’t entirely true; facts are pliable in wartime.
Besides, if all that were not rousing enough, one of the Dunkirk survivors brings home a terrier in his kitbag.
‘Authenticity, optimism, and a dog!’ cries the producer, hungarian émigré Gabriel Baker ( henry Goodman), presumably based on the great filmmaker Emeric Pressburger. he knows just how to appeal to British sensibilities.
Their Finest is a serious tale, however. it is littered with casualties of war and lurches in some unexpected directions with several, tragic twists. Yet it is leavened with plenty of deft comic touches.
Mostly, these are supplied by Bill Nighy, as a vain, mannered old ham of an actor, called Ambrose hilliard. There’s no point cracking any kind of gag about Nighy being perfectly cast in such a role, since he’s already dropped them all himself in the publicity interviews.
Besides, he really is very funny, at one point investing ‘ semolina pudding’ with exactly the same predatory loucheness Leslie Phillips used to get out of ‘Ding Dong!’
Eddie Marsan and helen McCrory, as hilliard’s agent and his sister, provide sterling comic support.
And Jeremy irons pops up, too,