Female Film Critics 24/375
Un Amor, director Isabel Coixet’s latest drama playing in competition at the San Sebastián International Film Festival 2023 and based on a best-selling novel by Sara Mesa, is a nuanced and emotional film driven by a powerful lead performance from Spanish star Laia Costa. The film is getting a lot of attention for its portrayal of female sexuality, but its themes go much deeper.
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Spanish director Isabel Coixet says the idea for Foodie Love, the new HBO Europe series that marks her first foray into television, came naturally to her, calling it a way to “use all the years eating in the most incredible restaurants in the world, and also in the strangest places.”
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In this slow-moving British period piece, Emily Mortimer plays Florence Green, a widow who moves to a sleepy coastal town in England to open a bookshop in an old abandoned house. It’s the 1950s, though, and outsiders — especially those who would be considered liberal elites today — are simply not welcome.
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In 1950s Britain, a widow moves to a small English village, buys a old house in town that had stood empty for years, with the intention to open a bookshop. Sounds harmless enough, maybe even something the village would welcome. But Florence Green (Emily Mortimer) does not find it so. It isn’t so much the bookshop that is the problem, although one seemly friendly villager offers her the not-to-encouraging advice that people around there don’t read. Well, the villager admits, there is one reader, the reclusive Mr. Brundish (Bill Nighy) but he never leaves his decaying mansion. No, the real problem,as it turns out, is not lack of readers, but that Florence happened to pick as the spot for her bookshop the very old house that a powerful local aristocrat Violet Gamat (Patricia Clarkson) had her eye on, planning to turn the building that everyone in town calls “the old house” into an “arts center.”
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Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy and Patricia Clarkson in one movie? That is a dream team right there. Despite such a quality cast, however, The Bookshop will likely test the patience of those who require peppier pacing and more compelling drama, even in a well-meaning film set in a British seaside village in 1959. Director Isabel Coixet’s screenplay, based on Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, focuses on Florence, a young widow (Mortimer) who decides to open a book store in an old damp house in the heart of the community.
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Emily Mortimer stars in Isabel Coixet’s The Bookshop, opening August 24. The indie drama is the latest triumph in Mortimer’s extraordinary career as a feminist actress-producer-screenwriter who hasn’t let the daunting challenges of dealing with the male-dominated movie business harden her heart.
If you enjoy richly observed, cross-cultural character studies, this dramedy should appeal to you. When she’s is abruptly dumped by
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Opening August 21, the AWFJ Movie of the Week is Learning to Drive, the new film from veteran Spanish director Isabel Coixet. Based on the New Yorker essay by Katha Pollitt and scrpted by Sarah Kernochan, it stars Patricia Clarkson as a New York writer who works to get her first driver’s license after her marriage breaks down. Read on…
Read moreTIFF 14 presented a program of films covering a wide range of stories and themes., including everything from insane revenge plots to stories about a genius codebreaker and women with Alzheimer’s. TIFF showed over 350 films. Usually known for programming a distinguished selection of films that paves the way to the award season, this year TIFF was a bit overshadowed by other festivals. Read on…
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