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| Josie Lawrence and Joan Plowright in Enchanted April. |
During World War I, two middle-aged women, fed up with their dreary
marriages, answer an ad to rent a castle in the Italian countryside for a
month; their lives – as well as the lives of two strangers who agree to
share the rent – are magically altered. That’s the premise of
Enchanted April. There have now been enough comedies of
this forest-of-Arden variety to call it a genre –
I Know Where I’m Going and
Local Hero and
High Season and, in a way,
May Fools and
Where the Heart Is (where the magic setting is a
fantastical vision of New York). I’m not sure why, but this is one sort of
movie that almost always seems to work: I loved all of those earlier
pictures, and
Enchanted April is a charmer. (The
exception, ironically, is the 1935 movie version of the same material, a
1922 novel by Elizabeth von Arnim). Part of the charm lies in the fact that
it’s as different from the other movies as they are from each other. The
screenwriter, English playwright Peter Barnes, has a quirky turn of phrase,
and he keeps throwing in twists and devices (like voice-overs transcribing
the characters’ thoughts) that you didn’t anticipate – and often, as in the
case of the voice-overs, that you would likely have predicted, wrongly,
wouldn’t work. The film isn’t fluid or polished; it skips around a bit, as
if the director, Mike Newell, were feeling his way through it. This
tentativeness enhances a viewer’s enjoyment; you experience the movie as a
series of delightful small discoveries.
