Kindling the love of books to belly in the fire boiling point, figuratively and literally, THE BOOKSHOP is perhaps the best British film of it’s ilk this year.
Embers of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Dandelion Wine stoke the story of THE BOOKSHOP, which is based on Penelope Fitzgerald’s Booker prize nominated novel of the same name.
Set in 1959, Florence Green, a free-spirited widow, puts personal grief behind her and risks everything to open up a bookshop – the first such shop in the sleepy seaside town of Hardborough, England. Fighting damp, cold and considerable local apathy she struggles to establish herself.
By exposing the narrow-minded local townsfolk to the best literature of the day including Nabokov’s scandalising Lolita and Ray Bradbury’s scary Fahrenheit 451, she fosters a new frontier in fiction thereby causing a cultural awakening in a town which has not changed for centuries.
Her activities bring her a kindred spirit and ally in the figure of Mr. Brundish, a recluse and avid reader, played in crusty affability by Bill Nighy who is himself sick of the town’s stale atmosphere.
But this mini social revolution also brings Florence fierce enemies, igniting the hostility of the town’s less prosperous shopkeepers and the granite hearted Mrs. Gamart, Hardborough’s vengeful, embittered, spiteful, mouldy old dough and wannabe doyenne of the local arts scene.
When Florence refuses to bend to Gamart’s will, they begin a struggle not just for the bookshop but for the very heart and soul of the town.
Emily Mortimer excels as the stoic pull up your socks and get on with it Florence, the plucky bibliophile and bully fighter. Mortimer is reunited with her co star from The Party, Patricia Clarkson, here presenting the worst of British society at the time – stuck up rather than stoic, a lady muck lording over the hoi polloi with privilege and position.
Clarkson is reunited with writer director Isabel Coixet, who guided her through Learning to Drive, a little gem from a few years ago. And so is THE BOOKSHOP, a little gem of a movie, based on a book, about the power of books.