ALL IN GOOD TIME

ALL IN GOOD TIME asks you to suspend your disbelief that a young couple could reach their wedding night as virgins.  It tries to make this easier by setting the film in a second generation Asian community.  As a member of that community, I was still incredulous.  Still, if you can force that issue from your mind, what you get is a genuinely funny, rewardingly spiky bittersweet drama about love - between husbands and wives, and parents and children.  These issues - miscommunication, the setting of boundaries - make this a movie with far wider appeal than a specialist Brit-Asian film. 

For the first half of the film the movie is a solid comedy and centres on the young virginal newlyweds, Veena and Atul, trying to get their end away in a cramped family home. But as we move into the second half of the film we the comedy dissolves into drama, as their marital difficulties prompt their parents to reconsider what their early married life was like, and what married life has settled into. I love how even in the early, explicitly funny laugh-out-loud scenes, we can always see the undercurrent of tension, and that even in the second half of the movie, which is far more emotionally tense, we still get wonderful flashes of humour. This speaks to the skill of the two playwrights - Bill Naughton of the original and Ayub Khan Din's adaptation. And I particularly admire the director, Nigel Cole (MADE IN DAGENHAM) choosing to end on such a conflicted, bittersweet note.

The casting is good all round. Vina (Amara Karan - ST TRINIANS) and Atul (Reece Ritchie - PRINCE OF PERSIA) are suitably gauche and sincere.  Meera Syal is brilliant as always, as Atul's mother Lupa. But it's Harish Patel as his father Eeshwar who steals the movie. As in BRICK LANE, it falls to Patel to play a character who is at once ridiculous but also deeply felt, and the emotional anchor of the piece.  He is quite simply outstanding.  

ALL IN GOOD TIME will be released in the UK and Ireland on May 11th.

iPad Round-Up 5 - MADE IN DAGHENHAM

History is written in broad brush-strokes, with the industrial revolution depicted as a battle between capital and workers.  But as an early scene in MADE IN DAGENHAM shows, by the late 1960s - a period we can now see as the dying breath of the British union movement - both capital and workers had settled into cosy set-pieces and horse-trading with white men on either side.   In this film those roles are played by Kenneth Cranham as the Union boss and Rupert Graves as the Ford boss. They are meeting to discuss equal pay for women, and both presume that the women's token representative, played by Sally Hawkins, should simply shut up and let the men decide what's what. That calcified system was ultimately dismantled by a woman - Margaret Thatcher - but she only got the political mandate to do so after the country had been brought to its knees in the mid-70s.  This movie takes place earlier, but still gives us three women bucking the system.  The first - our heroine - is Sally Hawkins' Rita - is a machinist working in Ford's Dagenham factory. She finds empathy from her boss's trophy wife/domestic slave, Lisa (Rosamund Pike) and support from Miranda Richardson's brilliantly spiky Barbara Castle. 

The film is a very easy watch, glorying in its period costumes and kitschy interiors, and rarely showing the true  hardships of a strike. It's all rather day-glo and, worst of all words, "feel-good". Still, insofar as it does make you feel good while teaching you something about the fight for equal pay (a fight still not yet won), that can't really be a bad thing, can it? That said, one might have hoped for a movie painted in less broad strokes and with less of a simplistic moral stance.

MADE IN DAGENHAM played Toronto 2010 and opened in Norway, the UK, Finland, Israel, the USA and Italy last year. It opened earlier this year in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, Singapore, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Mexico, Denmark and Turkey. It is available to rent and own.