Calendar Girls
dir. Nigel Cole
Touchstone Pictures
However much the leaders of Britain's film industry and entertainment media decry
the shallowness of American culture, nothing makes them happier than a UK film that
becomes a runaway hit in the States. The success of The Full Monty in 1997 unleashed
a spate of films desperately trying to be "this year's Full Monty" and often
claiming to be just that in their promotional info.
Time and again, filmmakers cribbed that movie's formula: Take some working-class English blokes and
have them do something stereotypically feminine or gay. Male prisoners got it twice in two years: 2000's Greenfingers had them enter a gardening competition, and 2001's Lucky Break (directed by Monty's Peter Cattaneo) had them stage
a musical to cover their jailbreak scheme. In Billy Elliot, the younger generation
of working-class males got into the act, as Billy shunned soccer for ballet. The
latest round of Monty-tinged efforts bend gender the other way, showing females of
various ages playing against the stereotypes of their sex and either their class or
ethnicity. In Bend It Like Beckham, a girl from a traditional Indian family succeeds at the
quintessential sport of British males. With Calendar Girls, the process comes full
circle, adapting the true story of some middle-aged, middle-class Englishwomen who
posed nude for a charity calendar — and in Monty's native Yorkshire no less.
The film's most endearing aspect is its portrayal of the relationships between the
two main female characters, Chris (Helen Mirren) and Annie (Julie Walters), and
their husbands. Annie's husband, John (John Alderton), is
dying of cancer, and Walters and Alderton bring great tenderness to the scenes of
John's decline and death without being maudlin. Chris and Annie's desire to raise
money for the local hospital in John's name motivates the calendar, but
the two are also rebelling against the staid domesticity of their local women's
club, which is played to the hilt with boring presentations on vegetables and
vacation photos that only Chris and Annie are honest enough to giggle at.
By targeting the club's drab respectability in all the easy, obvious ways, however, director
Nigel Cole misses the chance to create a truly comic send-up of middle-class mores;
likewise, the conservative element in the club collapses too easily to be much of a
foil for the freewheeling pair and their growing band of supporters. Worse, a number of sequences closely parallel scenes from the film's more famous predecessor. There are embarrassing moments of discovery, montages of the women exercising and using tanning beds (but without Donna Summer this
time) and even a mock striptease. Such similarities seem like bald attempts to stake a claim to the title of "this year's Full Monty," but really only reinforce important differences between the two films — most obviously Monty's success at making the strippers into an interesting ensemble of characters.
In Calendar Girls, Mirren and Walters are engaging, but their characters dominate the story so fully
that the other girls are reduced to one characteristic each: the
one whose husband doesn't make her feel sexy anymore, the proper Tory
matron, etc. The other characters offer hints of being interesting in their own
right, but are never explored.
When Chris wants to use the calendar to gain celebrity in America, the movie turns into a leaden morality tale about the value of friends and the drawbacks of selling out. This sour turn doesn't jeopardize the upbeat mood, but given that Calendar Girls is chiefly an attempt to ride the Full Monty bandwagon to US box office success, the irony makes it especially hard to swallow.
— Chris Pepus (cp_339@hotmail.com)
