SHIRLEY VALENTINE
With Pauline Collins, Tom Conti, Julia McKenzie, Alison Steadman, Bernard Hill, Joanna Lumley, and Tracie Bennett.
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This appreciation of character is more than just a staple of English theater. It’s also an essential aspect of English cinema, and it helps explain why that cinema as a whole has rightly been called “uncinematic.” (Even a recent and uncommon masterpiece such as Distant Voices, Still Lives, which is uncharacteristically cinematic in both form and style, draws on some of the resources of this taste and tradition.) The two essential ingredients of English cinema are words and characters rather than shots, camera movements, editing, mise en scene, or any of the other elements of directorial style, and if a handful of remarkable English directors–chiefly Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell–have nevertheless managed to make their own expressive mark with their work, they still are the exceptions in English cinema rather than the tradition. Most of the others–from Carol Reed and David Lean to Stephen Frears and Mike Leigh–are generally valued for the relative invisibility rather than the assertiveness of their creative personalities.
In the first part of the film, Shirley tells us some inconsequential things about her everyday existence, and a few incidents that illustrate them are related in flashback–her affected vegetarian neighbor Gillian (Julia McKenzie); Shirley’s circle of younger female friends, whom she calls the “clitoris kids”; her unimaginative and habit-driven husband Joe (Bernard Hill). (She occasionally comments on them with pithy aphorisms, e.g., “Marriage is like the Middle East, isn’t it? There is no solution.”) We also learn about her apparently feminist friend Jane (Alison Steadman), who wins a free two-week holiday in Greece for two and tries to persuade Shirley to join her on the trip.
