Exposing their niggles

10 April 2012

From the moment that their naked haunches launched a thousand "And finallys" on news bulletins across the globe, it was inevitable that movie treatment would be lavished upon those Daleswomen who modelled in the buff for a Women's Institute calendar.

How could any self-respecting film producer resist such a plot? The characters are a gaggle ofmiddle-class, middle-aged Yorkshire ladies, the sort you might encounter at a whist drive in Wetwang.

Their mission is to memorialise the recently-departed husband of one of their number by securing a new sofa for the local cancer ward. But their chosen fund-raising gimmick, a nudie calendar - soft focus, all tastefully done - is their real gift to the movie moguls.

The finished result gives a chorus line of distinguished British actors - Julie Walters, Helen Mirren, Annette Crosbie, Penelope Wilton, Celia Imrie - the opportunity to throw off their Damart flimsies and pose decorously behind cider presses and racks of cherry tarts.

Chris (Mirren) is the muscle behind the project, Annie ( Walters), the junior partner whose dying husband (John Alderton) provides their inspiration.

Crosbie, Wilton and Imrie are their collaborators and bosom pals, whose degrees of doubt and enthusiasm more or less mirror those of their male counterparts in The Full Monty. "No front bottoms," is Crosbie's principal condition.

Up to the point at which the skin shots are published, Calendar Girls is a total success: a well-upholstered British farce which manages to be emotionally engaging, full of good-natured smut, and satisfy any curiosity you might have had about the shape of Celia Imrie's breasts. (That's if you haven't witnessed her debut in which a flight to LA becomes a shameless plug for Virgin Atlantic.

Here, however, Firth has allowed these moments to colonise his script: an entire scene forms an infomercial for the Savoy Hotel; a gag at the climax of the movie revolves around the triumphant production of a Nike shirt; several minutes are given over to the hero's participation in an advert for Coca-Cola.

Someone ought to tell him that the ads are supposed to be over once the film has started.

It handles its central death with admirable grace, even finding a note of acceptable sentiment in a riff about women being like sunflowers - saving the most beautiful phase of their bloom, apparently, until the last.

Most importantly for its market, the movie makes stripping off a matter of female solidarity and self-expression: a canny trick which will probably prevent the dozier members of the audience from seeing that it is about as feminist as 1960s naturist flicks such as Naked As Nature Intended or Take Off Your Clothes and Live!

It then starts to move in a more ambitious direction, which might have been the cause of further praise, had the director, Nigel Cole, kept his nerve to the final reel.

The Full Monty, you will recall, concluded with a coy freeze-frame that denied the pay-off promised by the title - and left us with the bizarre impression that all the emotional and socio-economic woes under which its heroes were labouring had been instantly relieved by the synchronised removal of their Y-fronts.

Calendar Girls is brave enough to pursue its characters beyond this moment of elation, to the point at which their self-exposure becomes a source of anxious misery.

We see hacks and TV crews buzzing around them like desperate bargain-hunters at a bring-andbuy sale.

We watch the relationships between the central characters deteriorate under the pressure: Chris becomes increasingly intoxicatedby the media attention, losing-sight of her original motives; Annie grows sceptical about their progress into the headlines and chat-show studios, and begins to question her friend's priorities.

We are allowed to share in the moment when the majority of the group begins to feel besmirched and compromised by their fame - a realisation that comes when they are flown to Hollywood to lose their clothes in a tacky TV commercial for soap powder.

At this juncture, a more sophisticated and challenging film seems to be emerging from the thermal drawers of mainstream commercial comedy.

Unfortunately, we get no more than a teasing glimpse. The picture suggests that the calendar's success results in the exploitation of its models, then immediately suppresses this dangerously interesting idea. Of course, the movie can't help but be part of this cycle of exploitation, so perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised at this undignified retreat. But it is regrettable that the inevitable cop-out is handled with such a brazen lack of skill or wit.

Maybe some less trite dialogue could have been employed to bring the relationships of the characters back into equilibrium. Maybe psychological and narrative logic could have been more gently sacrificed in the pursuit of the requisite feelgood ending.

Then, perhaps, the last 10 minutes of the picture would have been a slightly less naked insult to the intelligence of its audience.

Calendar Girls
Cert: cert12A

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