CALENDAR GIRLS

Review

Members of an older women’s social club in a small English town decide to spice up their annual calendar sales with some nude photographs of themselves.

Yes, this definitely sounds like your typical movie concept. With that setup, the film (you can upload the live wallpapers hd with favorite films on your iPhone - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/live-wallpapers-hd-for-iphone/id1447348465
) looks like the female equivalent of The Full Monty, however, Calendar Girls is actually based on a true story, and has something to say. The film delivers a surprisingly thoughtful commentary on the hidden costs of sudden fame, and the ability of that fame to twist the best of intentions. The other message is that if older men are to be considered sexy, then so should older women. We seem to be at the cusp of a new trend in cinema, one that is not without merit, in which the decades of the older man/daughter-like woman romantic paradigm have finally gotten old. The new Jack Nicholson/Diane Keaton film Something’s Gotta Give challenges it directly, while here we have a more subtle approach, that simply presents older women as being worthy of interest.

Directed by Nigel Cole (Saving Grace) and written by Jim Firth (Cruise of the Gods—TV) and Juliette Towhidi (A Secret Audience), the film delivers a surprisingly credible story, which is not necessarily true for films based on real events. The energetic performances drive the film. Julie Walters (Billy Elliot) plays a woman who finds herself widowed and grief-stricken, and Helen Mirren (Gosford Park) plays her friend with the bright idea to take a piece of her dead husband’s poetry and interpret it as an implicit suggestion for the calendar. Although this seems a bit preposterous as I write it, with movie timing, this all makes sense on screen.

What really works well is the idea that women not only can be beautiful, but that commonly accepted notions of beauty and the value of beauty itself are wrong. In a film that ostensibly features the objectification of women, it’s a welcome surprise to discover a powerful counteroffensive to Naomi Wolf’s frighteningly accurate beauty myth. The film gets the remarks about these women’s bodies out in the open early, so that the issue is exposed, cauterized, and put to rest. For the rest of the film, it doesn’t matter if they’re overweight, older than your typical nude subject, or slightly out of phase with any of the dozens of carefully prescribed parameters that women are subjected to and subject themselves to in our so-called liberated society. Amazingly, through the course of the story, these old naked women become simply people with interesting histories and interesting personalities.

The film is far from a polemic though, making its point so subtly that you barely know it’s happening. Instead, the film charms with the old trusty story arcs of small town girl makes good, fish out of water, and stand by your girlfriend. By clothing itself in this friendly conventional Brit-com format, the film is effectively a Trojan horse of feminist discourse, and deserves every possible chance to overcome the strongholds of sexist thinking that persist to this day.