/ ' a ','. CALENDAR GIRLS (12A) 108mm .00 Sex sells: it’s a fact. Nothing grabs public attention like a naked woman. Billboards. newspapers, television and magazines all thrive on tits and arse. As the story of the Calendar Girls highlights, it doesn't even matter if the ladies do not look like glamour models, all that's needed is the sight of flesh to set pulses a-racing and tills a- ringing.
This is based on the true story (and one you would have been lucky to avoid hearing about) of a group of bored middle-aged women from a small Yorkshire village who all posed nude for a Women‘s Institute Calendar back in 1999 in order to raise funds for the local hospital. The press subsequently had wet dreams about this human interest story (nudity plus calendar equals fruity exclusive for worldwide distribution) and the next rather obvious stop (according to the film) was Hollywood.
Filmmakers retelling true stories find it even harder than governments talking about weapons of mass destruction to keep to the facts. Calendar Girls is the sexed-up version of events that happened in the Dales between the Tai-Chi and painting classes and cookery competitions. But there is something rather fun in watching a group of middle-aged women act like they are the girls at St Trinians minus the school uniform. Director Nigel Cole, who had previously dabbled with an ageing lady saga in Saving Grace, once again proves he is a safe pair of hands with this material particularly when he centres the film on the relationships that Chris (Helen Mirren) has with her family and best friend, widower Annie
Reflecting the film‘s own subversion of the facts, the characters have been given fictional names, despite the endless media exposure (back in 1999) of their well-known real life equivalents. No doubt this was because the filmmakers were embarrassed by the schmaltzy turn the film makes: the calendar comes out and these wives of balding farmers are wooed by Hollywood.
All of a sudden, these women take on previously unseen working class characteristics as they coo
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of America. The heart of Calendar Girls is ripped from the wall in the hunt for a transatlantic audience. Everything goes off kilter, including the relationship Chris has with her friends and family, all supposedly because Chris falls for the lure and glamour of Hollywood. Sadly, it‘s not Chris, but the filmmakers who have fallen into the very trap they try so painstakingly to expose as the movie stutters to its own over-sentimental conclusion. (Kaleem Aftab)
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