Sunday, August 24, 2008

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Miss Pettigrew - päivä täynnä elämää. GB (c) 2007 Focus Features. D: Bharat Nalluri. SC: David Magee, Simon Beaufoy - based on the novel by Winifred Watson (1938). DP: John de Borman - Super35 - anamorphic - film print 35mm - digital intermediate by Framestore - colour by DeLuxe - Panavision 1:2,35. Music: vintage tunes by Cole Porter ("Anything Goes"), "If I Didn't Care". Starring Frances McDormand (Guinevere Pettigrew), Amy Adams (Delysia Lafosse), Shirley Henderson (Edythe Dubarry), Ciarán Hinds (Joe Blumfeld). A FS Film release print with Finnish /Swedish subtitles by Arto Vartiainen / Ditte Kronström. Viewed at Kinopalatsi 3, Helsinki, 23 August 2008. - Good entertainment set in London on the eve of WWII as the middle-aged nanny becomes the social secretary of a chanteuse. - "I'm an expert on the lack of love". - There is a light touch and elegance in the film that threatens to stay superficial, but there are also moments of real feeling. In the music, the moment of true feeling is "If I Didn't Care". - The career of Joe Blumfeld from socks to brassières. - The Depression ambience of unemployment and soup lines. The recurrent motif of hunger during Miss Pettigrew's day. She eats the cucumber slices in the beauty parlor and tries to get the half-eaten apple from the floor of the railway station. - The happy endings are maybe too pat, but believable at first because of the sincerity of the actors. "I've been looking for you all my life".

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