Isabel Coixet (2017)
I have a persistent bee in my bonnet about foreign language films that get away with things Anglophone critics would deride in British or American movies. I think – with apologies for the mixed headgear-footwear metaphors – that Isabel Coixet’s The Bookshop is evidence of the boot on the other foot. As a part-Spanish co-production, directed by a Spaniard, this adaptation of Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1978 novel was eligible for Goya awards and won Best Film, Director and Screenplay at this year’s ceremony. In Spain, according to Wikipedia, there were ‘unanimous positive reviews’; the critical reception over here has been much less generous. A probable explanation is that the 1959 English setting, characters and dialogue give the movie, to Spanish eyes and ears, an exotic quaintness – give it, in other words, protection. The Bookshop is in several ways a bad film but it’s an odd one too. That oddness and an unexpectedly lovely performance by Bill Nighy make it well worth watching.
Florence Green (Emily Mortimer), a widow in her forties, determines to open a bookshop in Hardborough, the small (fictional) Suffolk coastal town she’s lived in for some time. Determination is certainly needed on Florence’s part. She acquires as her home and business premises a damp, shabby property, badly in need of renovation. Once the shop finally opens there, it does a far from roaring trade. But the Old House, as it’s known, is of interest to others: local bigwig Violet Gamart (Patricia Clarkson) has ambitions for the place to become an arts centre. She’s therefore miffed by the bookshop but not discouraged. Violet’s MP nephew sponsors a parliamentary bill. The (also presumably fictional) ‘Access to Places of Public Interest Act’ passes into law, enabling compulsory purchase by local councils of buildings of historical significance. This is the fate of the Old House and signals the end of Florence’s life in Hardborough. The arts centre is among the oddities of the story, both as the effective enemy of the bookshop (and the small lending library Florence sets up within it) and as a potential going concern. It’s clear that Violet sees the centre as a means of enriching not the community but her own standing within it. Even so, she might have had a more philistine project in mind to underpin the film’s demonisation of her. It’s less clear why, since few Hardborough residents appear to read books, they’d be expected to flock to the concerts and lectures that Violet tells Florence will be on the arts centre’s menu.
In terms of plot, the above is reasonably faithful to Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel but Isabel Coixet makes some melodramatising adjustments and additions to the original. These mostly centre on, or derive from, the town intellectual Edmund Brundish (Bill Nighy), Florence’s most (indeed sole) committed customer. Brundish is so reclusive that they communicate by letter rather than in person and Florence sends him books by post. Just as the relationship seems to be settling into 84 Charing Cross Road territory (minus the intervening Atlantic Ocean), Florence receives an invitation to afternoon tea at Brundish’s house, where he lives alone. The place has the look of a manor out of Gothic literature but his reading tastes are more modern. He rubbishes the Bronte sisters. He’s grateful to Florence for introducing him to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451. When she asks his advice on whether she should order multiple copies of Nabokov’s Lolita, Brundish encourages her to do so. Coixet builds up the relationship between them to the edge of romance before abruptly terminating it. Brundish visits Violet Gamart to protest her sustained attempts to thwart and oust Florence: he gets so worked up, he has a heart attack and dies on his way home to Nightmare Abbey. The film ends not simply (as the book does) with Florence’s eviction and departure but with the physical destruction of the Old House. In the early days of the shop, Christine Gipping (Honor Kneafsey), a young schoolgirl, used to help out there, not for the love of books but to earn money (her needy family are fine with that). Outraged at how Florence has been treated, Christine burns the site down and Violet Gamart’s dream of an arts centre also goes up in smoke.
Books are still on the shelves inside the Old House so Christine’s arson does more – too much more – than echo the earlier references to Fahrenheit 451. It ends, or nearly ends, the film in a blaze of barbarism that would seem thoroughly incongruous were it not for earlier pieces of heavy-handedness. When Florence tells Christine what you must never do using a paraffin heater, you know that advice, in due course, will be importantly ignored. The staging of Brundish’s death and Alfonso Vilallonga’s tragic score, which, until the closing stages, has seemed over the top, also pave the way for the melodramatic finale. (The only printed survivor of the fire is A High Wind in Jamaica, which Florence once particularly recommended to Christine.) The conflagration sits oddly, though, with the message and tone of the very ending of The Bookshop, in which the story’s voiceover narrator is revealed to be the middle-aged Christine (Francesca McGill): inspired by Florence’s example, the adolescent book-burner now runs … a bookshop. The narration, read by an uncredited Julie Christie (who appeared in Truffaut’s 1966 film of Fahrenheit 451), has included more than one bibliophilic platitude of the sort you see on book tokens – you’re-never-alone-with-a-good-novel, that kind of thing – and tweeness reigns in the postscript. Look, there’s a copy of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop on display in Christine’s shop!
As often happens, the voiceover features largely in the early stages, to give us our bearings, then disappears until a last-minute return. It’s nevertheless overused, vexingly telling us at the start what Florence is feeling, when Emily Mortimer’s face is already supplying the evidence. Most of the dialogue that follows similarly leaves nothing to the imagination, which makes Coixet’s pacing of the verbal exchanges bizarre: their lack of rhythm implies that something important is unspoken. About halfway through the film, a minor female character called Kattie (Charlotte Vega) says of Milo North (James Lance), with whom she’s currently involved, ‘You’ll never know if a man like him has a rich inner life or if there’s nothing there at all’. The line resonates because that’s what you’ve been wondering about the dialogue more generally – and you’re increasingly inclined to think it’s the latter rather than the former. (Kattie sensibly reaches the same conclusion about Milo.)
The Lolita order subplot, taken from Fitzgerald, is, in the film at least, opaque in terms of both Florence’s motivation and its consequences. She seeks Brundish’s opinion of the novel but what is her own? On what evidence does he say to her, before pronouncing, that it’s probably less important to him than it is to Florence whether or not something is moral? Brundish judges Lolita ‘a good book, and therefore you should try to sell it to the inhabitants of Hardborough. They won’t understand it, but that’s all to the good – understanding makes the mind lazy’. So Florence orders 250 copies of Lolita in its distinctive Olympia Press pale-green cover, and puts a sign in the bookshop window advertising the ‘novel that is shocking the world’. There’s no indication of her bulk-buying anything else so is this just a desperate-cum-cynical bid to boost sales? Hardborough residents flock to the Old House and gawp at the window but we don’t know if any of them buy the book. All that matters to the narrative is that the crowd in the street helps reinforce Violet Gamart’s anti-Florence campaign. It’s something of an irony, of course, that what Penelope Fitzgerald, in 1978, may have intended as a comment on the moral climate of a bygone era doesn’t work that way forty years on, now that Nabokov’s novel has regained its political incorrectness. At least Isabel Coixet didn’t chicken out, move the setting on a year and have Florence try instead to flog copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the aftermath of the 1960 obscenity trial.
Emily Mortimer is emotionally acute throughout but she has no one to play against productively until Florence meets Brundish. Aside from Mortimer, Nighy, Clarkson and Frances Barber (in a cameo), the cast isn’t well known – so I don’t like saying that much of the acting in The Bookshop is unusually ropy and name names, but it is and here they are. There’s a good excuse in the case of the Spaniard Jorge Suquet (as Florence’s solicitor), who’s unused to playing Englishmen speaking English. And perhaps Coixet’s nationality is a larger contributory factor, though she has directed several English-language films before. Honor Kneafsey has an expressive face and gives Christine a convincing personality but her line readings are erratic, something a native-English-speaking director might have helped her with more. Whatever the reasons, Hunter Tremayne (a bank manager), James Murphy (Violet’s nephew) and Lucy Tillett (Christine’s mother) are emphatically wooden. Reg Wilson (Violet’s retired general husband) isn’t much better. James Lance is a bigger name than these (although new to me) but he’s all over the place as Milo, a slippery fainéant, though he supposedly works at the BBC. (It’s inexplicable that, after Christine is prevented by school inspectors from continuing to help in the bookshop, Florence agrees to let Milo occasionally mind the store – with results predictably damaging to her interests.)
Patricia Clarkson has worked with Isabel Coixet before (on Elegy (2008) and Learning to Drive (2014)) but her portrait of the malign queen bee Violet, although technically far more sophisticated than any of the above, is also bad. The problem isn’t so much that it’s overly mannered, rather that you repeatedly see Clarkson preparing her effects and the result being anti-climactic. I rarely enjoy Bill Nighy as much as many others seem to. He obviously has a style all his own – a style he often relies on effectively but I think lazily. Not here. The afternoon tea conversation between Florence and Brundish raises the film (and Emily Mortimer’s playing) by several levels. Nighy gets right inside a man whose life has been solitary so long that he’s forgotten the rudiments of social interaction: you see it in Brundish’s almost frozen bearing and his avoidance of eye contact – until one or two of Florence’s remarks make an impact enough for him to look involuntarily at her. His fury in the fatal encounter with Violet is terrific. We see what’s been released in Brundish as he walks away from the meeting and his stiff bearing turns into a determined, arm-swinging march. It’s a pity this ends in the cliché of a fatal seizure, an earlier moment that sees Florence kiss him doesn’t work either, and don’t ask how the isolated Brundish has his finger so precisely on the pulse of current local gossip. No matter: this is the finest (and most touching) acting I’ve seen from Bill Nighy. It makes The Bookshop, in spite of everything, a memorable film.
4 July 2018
