Cecil says: I had no idea what to expect from The Bookshop, except that
I – correctly – assumed it would revolve around a book shop…
Funnily enough I realised as the voiceover began that I had
been expecting a quaint American small town book shop and some story built
around that. Just shows how ingrained our expectation of American culture is on
our screens. But, no, The Bookshop is filmed mostly on location in Northern
Ireland (we recognised some of the coastal scenes), and I was interested in how
many of the credits rolling by at the end of the film seemed to be of Catalan
origin (and sure enough, the film was written and directed by Isabel Coixet
from Barcelona, and she involved lots of Catalan folk in the production – good
for her, I say).
However, this says nothing about the film itself. The
voiceover runs right through the film and I won’t do a spoiler on who the
character turns out to be whose voice it is, but another surprise only a few
seconds in was the appearance strolling into sight over the horizon of Bill
Nighy. I had no idea he was in the film at all, but I knew Bea would be
pleased, and if I was a betting man, I’d have a good chance of winnings if I
bet on Bill Nighy appearing in pretty well every film we see these days.
The premise of the film: outsider comes into small village
in (not totally clear what era – but since Lolita has just been published, it
suggests 1950s) England with a desire to convert on old house into a bookshop.
Against her is one of the local dignitaries, who has aspirations to have a
local arts centre housed there; and at the first party the prospective bookshop
owner attends, she gets fairly short shrift from most locals, who are either
definitely in the Duchess’s camp or are clearly not interested in books.
So far it smacks a little of Vicar of Dibley. But there
isn’t much humour here, and the pace is fairly slow. But the plot does develop
nicely and relationship between Emily Mortimer (Florence Green) and Bill Nighy
(Edmund Brundish) is rather nice to watch as it slowly develops, though never
quite materialises, rather like in Remains of the Day.
Looking at the book industry today (not that I know much
about it), it’s gratifying that there are still independent book shops doted
around the place, and we always try to drop by on our travels. It can’t have
been easy even in the 1950s to make a bookshop in a small village profitable,
but it’s unimaginable now that such a bookshop – in a village that can’t have
had that many inhabitants altogether – would take a gamble and order 200 copies
of a new release like Lolita. Is there any book today which might sell like
that?
***
Bea says: I am a life long book lover, and hence a bookshop lover, so
any film that purports to be about either is onto a winner with me, and if it
also has Bill Nighy in it – well even better.
You would think that would mean I would give this a 5 star rating, but
actually the plot is a little slow, even for me and I am pretty tolerant of
that, and I just didn’t feel I got enough inside the head of the main character
to really embody the film – I watched the “action” (such as there was), rather
than embodying it, so I felt a sense of distance. I noted in the credits that it is adapted
from a novel and I would now like to read the novel, to see if the sense of
distance is the same. I did like the
neat ending, where we see the legacy of children being around books, bookshops
and book lovers, and it did let me dream a little about running a small bookshop
in a small town….
Overall recommended for book lovers everywhere, for a Sunday
afternoon or cozy winters evening.
***1/2
No comments:
Post a Comment