Enchanted April

Lottie Wilkins' empty life as the wife of a lawyer is as dull as the English weather, until the day she sees an ad in The Times for a castle for rent by the Italian seaside. Lottie convinces three female friends to come on a vacation without husbands. The women are overwhelmed by the magic and the atmosphere of the beautiful castle and its environs. After one week in Italy, Lottie sends for her husband in the hope that this enchanting setting will renew their marriage.
Comment:
The Englishman Mike Newell made his breakthrough as a film maker in 1984 with Dance With a Stranger; the film about Ruth Ellis, the last woman condemned to death and hanged in Great Britain. In that film Miranda Richardson made her debut in the leading part. Since then she has come to be one of England's most appreciated character actresses. She can also be seen in another of the festival's films, The Crying Game by Neil Jordan.
In Newell's Enchanted April Miranda Richardson is back in a sensitive part, together with, among others, the striking Joan Plowright. Enchanted April is a screen version of Elisabeth von Arnim's feminist and slightly cynical story about four women on the run from the men, the rain and the
gloominess of London, in the years after the First World War. The story is characterized by the kind of bittersweet romanticism that was typical of so much of the literature of the time - the lost life that is retrieved in a Utopia set in an exotic environment, thriving with life.
A clear parallel can be found in E.M.
Forster's brilliant novels, filmed (sometimes a bit too ambitiously) by David Lean and James Ivory; films with spectacular settings and acting not far from comedy. Most recently in Ivory's Howard's End, where the British acting elite appears against a background of sweeping camera movements over magnificent scenery -like a kind of Sunday excursion to an Edwardian playground. Newell is not Quite as grandiose, but no less effective with his focus on ensemble acting and expressive close-ups.
In Enchanted April the women vacation in a sunny Italy that awakens feelings so far undreamt of. The frail Lottie Wilkins, eminently portrayed by Josie Lawrence, is a subservient housewife who suddenly begins to give full expression to her feelings, in a cautious but successful revolt against patriarchal routine. The others are unconsciously taken along by her renewed lust for life and soon happiness prevails in the little castle San Salvatore
Erik Hedling

Medverkande
Miranda Richardson, Joan Plowright: Producent
Ann Scott: Manus
Elizabeth von Arnim: Foto
Rex Maidment: Musik
Richard Bennet: Talat språk
English