Ethel & Ernest

The title characters from Ethel and Ernest, with their son (and the author) Raymond.

Ethel & Ernest is an animation, based on Raymond Briggs’s semi-autobiographical book based on the lives of his parents.

In a filmed introduction (featuring Snowman plates and a Fungus the Bogeyman mug) Briggs talks about how he wanted to write a book about his parents, even though nothing major happened to them during their lives.

The film itself opens in 1928 with Ethel and Ernest’s first meeting, as Ernest passes by the house where Ethel works as a housemaid.  It follows them through until 1971, the year both of them passed away.

What is of interest is not what happened to Ethel and Ernest, but what happened around them. The film begins in a world that would not be unfamiliar to the Victorians – Ethel is a servant – and ends in a world that is recognisable to us – the moon landings have happened, they have a car, TV, a phone.

Ethel & Ernest is a lovely, gentle film, moving and funny by turns; Ethel worries if they’ll be able to afford the £825 they pay for their house in Wimbledon over the twenty years of their mortgage, you see the rise of Hitler, the post-war Labour landslide and the creation of the NHS.

Brenda Blethyn and Jim Broadbent play the title characters, and though it’s only a small cast, all the other voices are well known names. It’s the sort of film you’ll flick on during a quiet bank holiday and end up really enjoying; it’s a social history of the mid twentieth century in Britain. There’s a Paul McCartney song over the end credits, apparently because he was a fan of Raymond Briggs, and when they met they got on well; they must be similar ages and of similar backgrounds.

Ethel & Ernest won’t change the world but it will make you laugh, and it might make you cry too.

Their Finest

Gemma Arterton (sigh) and Bill Nighy in Their Finest.

Their Finest tells the story of the trials and tribulations that took place when Tesco were searching for products for their version of Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference range.

That’s a joke, of course, it’s a film set in the world of British propaganda films during the Second World War. It’s based on the novel by Lissa Evans and is directed by Lone Scherfig, who has done good films (Italian For Beginners, An Education) and bad (The Riot Club).  Thankfully, this is firmly in the former category.

Arterton (if you don’t like Gemma Arterton please make yourself known so you can be taken to a re-education camp) plays Catrin Cole, a Welsh woman who has moved to London with her husband as he struggles to find work as an artist. Catrin stumbles into a job with the Ministry of Information, writing dialogue for women in propaganda films.

Propaganda gets a bad name, but the films made by the Crown Film Unit during the Second World War were incredibly important; thirty million people went to the cinema every week during the war (1946 was actually the peak for British cinema going), and short documentaries were shown during lunch breaks in factories to raise morale.

The film also shows the social mobility that happened during the Second World War; the historian AJP Taylor said it was the closest Britain has ever come to being a socialist republic; class mattered less, people moved around more, and women took on traditionally male roles (the Queen was a mechanic, for example).

Anyway, Catrin begins works on a film about Dunkirk with Buckley (played by Sam Claflin), which starts out as apparently based on a true story and gets more and more fictional as more people have their say; a dog and an American lead are added. As she grows apart from her husband, Catrin grows closer to Buckley, especially when the film goes on location, but it’s not that simple and things don’t run smoothly.

The cast is superb; Rachael Stirling (Guy Garvey’s wife – he’s done well for himself) plays a woman from the ministry with lesbian tendencies and some great dialogue. Bill Nighy is an aging actor, Richard E Grant a studio executive and Jeremy Irons a Minister. Eddie Marsan and Helen McCrory pop up too.

The film isn’t perfect; there are moments it drags, but you don’t really care because you enjoy spending time with the characters and in the period. It’s a funny, sweet love letter to a time period and a type of film that has been lost. It’s quite a feminist film too.

A few days before I’d been to see a Royal Television Society talk about The Night Manager, with the director Susanne Bier; like Scherfig she’s a Danish woman. I’m not sure why high quality British work is being made by Danish women but I’d be snapping up every girl in Copenhagen that had ever picked up a camera if I was Working Title or the BBC.