Dir. Sam
Garbarski , Belgium/ Luxembourg/ UK/ Germany/ France, 2007,
103 mins
Cast: Marianne Faithfull, Jenny Agutter, Miki Manojlovic
Review by Carol Allen
The normally still
glamorous Faithfull is transformed in this into Maggie, a plump
and frumpy middle aged widow with mousy hair,
unflattering clothes, a lumpy walk and a
timid attitude to the world, which reduces
the actress's normally robust, husky voice
to a whisper. Maggie's beloved grandson Ollie
is seriously ill and the only hope of a cure
is to send him to Australia. for an experimental
treatment. The bank refuses her a loan and
the job centre classify her as unemployable
due to her age. Then Maggie spots an ad in
a Soho sex club for "Hostess wanted" and
surprisingly is offered the job due to the
softness of her hands. The service she is
asked to provide is what is described in
the trade as "hand relief", hence
her professional name "Irina Palm".
And despite her initial shock at what the
job involves, for the sake of her grandson
Maggie embarks on her new career as a sex
worker. This sounds like the stuff of bawdy
British comedies with a heart such as "Personal
Services" and "Calendar Girls".
And it does indeed have its gently comic
elements. Maggie's only contact with her
clients is through a hole in the wall of
the cubicle, where she works, going about
her task wearing a flowered pinny and looking
a bit like a charlady briskly milking a
cow. And the curiosity of the people in
the country village where she lives as
to what is the accident causing her to
wear her arm in a sling also raises a smile,
the injury being caused by a hazard of
the job somewhat akin to tennis elbow!
Belgian director Garbarski conceived the
story as a European project, and though
he has transposed it to an English setting,
the film has a distinctly wistful and melancholy
East European feel to it in the manner
of the English language films of Pawel
Pawlikowski. Despite the subject matter
there is nothing Rabelaisian in the treatment
and no nudity or naughty bits on show.
Serbian actor Manojlovic
plays Miki, the owner of the club, a
tough businessman with a kindly heart,
Agutter is Maggie's brittle, fair weather "best friend" in
the village and Kevin Bishop and Siobhan
Hewlett are the realistically and unsympathetically
drawn parents of little Ollie. Faithfull
is rarely off the screen and her performance
as a woman with virtually no experience
of life outside her home coming out of
her shell and discovering her strength
and humour is subtle, engrossing and faultless
in the context of the film. The gentleness
of the story's treatment sometimes slows
the pace down to a crawl and the repetitive
soundtrack music becomes a bit irritating
after a while but despite those drawbacks
this European art movie set in England
is well worth seeing.
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