chani | (no subject) (Reply)

Despite many RL stuff going on, I managed to see two movies during my Holiday, the british Vera Drake and the French L' Esquive. I'll save my review of L' Esquive for later...

I feard this movie a little, because I didn't like much Secret and Lies by Mike Leigh. But Vera Drake was really a good surprise.

It was simple and touching but no melodramatic, despite a tear-jerking scene when Vera is questioned at the police station. Yet I was moved with the gentleness showed by the police when they arrested her and when they realized how naive she was about how the woman making the appointments was using her.

I loved the way the 50's society is shown, and the mixture of all those accents in London...and the magic of the cup of tea!

Imelda Staunton is great but the cast overall is quite excellent(actors we have seen in many English films or English tv shows!). I liked the story of the two brothers, and the "Reg and Ethel" thing, but I think that this movie is mostly about women. Men can be supportive or not, but they are often cluless.

All the women are very interesting. Vera's daughter, the hopelessly dorky Ethel (great performance through the actress' body language!), the heartless sister in law who looks like a pin-up, Lily who is Vera's acid-tongued friend and who is actually paid by the pregnant women without Vera suspecting it, and also the mother of the young woman who almost dies after the abortion performed by Vera...(that mother doesn't want to finger Vera Drake despite her daughter's serious condition, but she does it in the end), the police woman who is so kind towards Vera but has to do her job nonetheless. They are all trapped.

At some point all those women are seen as vulnerable, even the sister in law.

But it's about Vera first.

Always smiling and humming while working her way in life, Vera is like a character of Chaplin's movies. But her face changes when the police comes in her apartment. She is wonderfully expressive in that very short scene that must last only a few seconds,her face registering different emotions as she realizes what is happening. We can see her world suddenly collapsing on her features.

Then she becomes a wrecked creature, tinier and tinier. She is so touching and vulnerable when she asks the police whether they could come back the next day because the family is celebrating her daughter's engagement.

I prefer the first half of the movie, I think that Staunton's performance is terrific then and the scene when the police arrives is her best performance IMO.

Yet the film isn't about her being arrested and convict for performing abortions, even though it's a big part of the second half of the movie, it's a film about a petite middle-age woman from the lower classes. About people who aren't sexy and glamourous, people who are neither heroes nor monsters unlike what we often see in movies.

Humanity is the key element. Vera Drake is a good person,a kind soul helping the hopeless (all of them...pregnant women but also her daughter, her mother, Reg, sick people...), but the movie never falls into pathos and miserabilism. For instance Vara stays very professional and she never stops to comfort the women whom "she's helps out" even when one of them completely breaks down in front of her.

The contrast between the social classes about how similar situations are handled was interesting (it's a men's world in the upper class while men are outsiders in Vera's world) but it's mostly the portrait of a lady...

And damn that woman had a good husband!

This is movie that makes you want to get married and have a cup of tea!