Books and bookstore lovers will find many things they will like in ‘The Bookshop‘, the film made in 2017 by Isabel Coixet. It is a film about books and how they can change people’s lives, about people who love books and dedicate their lives to them. ‘The Bookshop‘ and is a very British film although Isabel Coixet was born in Spain (but with enough international productions in her filmography). The film is British not only because the story takes place in England, but also in its style, characters and narrative approach. In the end, this excess of Britishness proves to be one of the main problems of the film.
The story. We are in 1959, in a small and picturesque town on the coast of England. Florence Greene (Emily Mortimer) is a war widow whose only passion in life is books. We are not told, but we can guess that she remained alone very young, what we see from a flashback is that her short period of happiness with her husband who fell in the war was also related to books. They had met in a bookshop. Maybe that’s why she decides to open a bookshop in the seaside town, in an old building, on the edge of living conditions. He plans opposed by the city’s rich and strong, led by the evil Violet Gamart (Patricia Clarkson), the owner of a sumptuous residence, belonging to a family with strong enough ties in London to influence the enactment of a law to expropriate buildings such as Florence’s bookstore with the scope of opening there dubious art clubs. The local inhabitants are in favor of the heroine, among them the recluse Mr. Brundish (Bill Nighy) who shares her passion for good literature and a girl in her teens who is her employee and who will play a key role in the story. The bookshop opens, but will it withstand the pressures and prejudices?
What I liked. I share the passion for books and bookstores, and not only I vibrated at the scenes in the bookshop but I could feel the smell of books in my nostrils. Ray Bradbury and Nabokov (or rather their books) play an important role in the story. Emily Mortimer is exceptional in the lead role, one of those female roles that radiate beauty and goodness, and that can’t help but conquer. The description of the atmosphere of the place with the social hierarchy and the differences of class and status is well served by the rest of the acting interpretations that are OK, at the level of good English productions. The cinematography is refined and delicate, the scenes from the bookshops, in the mansions of the rich, and especially the outdoors ones contribute to the visual quality of the film. What I liked less. The script is thin. There is a surprise in the end that widens and even changes the perspective of the story, but it comes too late to erase the impression of predictable storytelling, something like a Disney production made in the BBC studios, or to balance the effect of the excessive use of off-screen comments which, as usual, do not help the story and do not add quality of a visual arts production. ‘The Bookshop‘ has a beautiful idea to start from and many visual and cinematic qualities, but the lack of consistency of the plot makes this production largely miss its target.