Emily Mortimer as Florence Green in the meadow contemplating opening her bookshop (2017, The Bookshop)
Kelly MacDonald her first visit to Robert, sees she can indulge in her secret passion, doing puzzles from among many many that at home she stashes away (2018, Puzzle)
Reading books & doing jigsaws — what’s not to like?
Dear friends and readers,
Among the kinds of blogs I’ve not been getting to recently, which I used to place here regularly — women artists, foremother poets, translation studies — and keep vowing to return to, is the summer woman’s film. I have more excuse for this last than mere lack of time and finding myself holding to a higher standard of sheer information: I’ve not seen any women’s films this summer until very recently, and then suddenly, two: Isabel Coixet’s The Bookshop, adapted from Penelope Fitzgerald’s superb novella of the same name; and Puzzle, directed by Marc Turtletaub, scripted by Oren Moverman and Polly Mann. My jump off point: I take the opposite view expressed by Neil Minow about Bookshop, which he thinks “never comes together,”, and from Christy Lemire about Puzzle, which she finds “a lovely surprize.”
I think differently. These are from the once hallowed Roger Ebert site, which is not what it was when he was alive and its most frequent contributor. In both cases, the writers begin with a set of expectations: The Bookshop is supposed to be about books themselves, and is missing (so Minow thinks) critiques of books: why do we not hear how good Lolita is? or what the young girl clerk who so grates on Minow’s nerves, Christine (Honor Kneafsey) thinks of it or other books:
Florence and Christine reading together
On the other hand, Lemire was not expecting the wife of this utterly conventional family: garage mechanic husband, stay-at-home housewife to leave her husband. She does not even know how to operate a cell phone nor does she understand why one would want such a gadget, and has brought up two sons who expect her to serve them hand-and-foot:
Bubba Weiler as Ziggy, Austin Abrams as Gabe, David Denman as Louie (the sons and father) staring expectant at Agnes
Lemire is therefore just delighted that we are not stuck in this family-centered story, but move out from there to follow the wife’s adventures alone.
Perhaps Neil Minow should have read Fitzgerald’s book, for then he would have understood the source is a story about how power works in a community: it’s about how a woman who has been exercising control over central experiences of people in her town, Mrs Gamart (played by Patricia Clarkson) uses her connections, status, and subtle manipulative techniques fostered by the nature of the usually socially dysfunctional get-togethers (I say dysfunctional if you thought the purpose of getting together was to form friendships) to destroy another woman’s desire to find a function in life by using what money she has to sell books. I wrote an analysis of this book and others by Fitzgerald when Womenwriters@groups.io was having a group reading and discussion of Fitzgerald’s novels and Hermione Lee’s literary biography of her: Penelope Fitzgerald: The Bookshop and Offshore; Charlotte Mew. It’s about how a widow without the least trace of malice (so Florence doesn’t recognize a determined hatred) and kind heart cannot preserve herself against hostile inexorable power. We watch Florence after years of solitude and withdrawal come out of her peaceful shell to invest in, create, and build up a thriving bookshop business, only to have it destroyed insidiously step-by-step by an elite woman who knows how to get a law passed to enable the local gov’t to take over the shop, how to pressure a banker, a solicitor, an unscrupulous BBC layabout to undermine and sabotage the shop to the point where Florence is left without any money or a place even to live.
The only person on Florence’s side is the reclusive Mr Brundish, who, unlike Florence, knows exactly what Mrs Gamart is doing, and attempts to stop her by confronting her:
Bill Nighy (brilliant as the nervous man with unusual tastes) demanding to Mrs Gamart that she leave Florence Green alone
Coixet’s film has flaws or difficulties. Much that happens in Fitzgerald’s book is not visible, and it is only after Florence sees the effect of Mrs Gamart’s undercover and underhanded endeavors in say the form of a letter, or a school inspector taking Christine away from the shop, or a court order about her window (with the offending Lolita in it) that she slowly realizes she is being strangled by an encircling malign octopus. A film cannot go on for hours and must be understandable so Coixet gives us dramatic (sometimes too melodramatic) scenes or visualizations that are not in the book. Nighy and Mortimer manage to keep their scenes to the awkward, piquantly and/or poignantly comic (they are directed to behave in stylized ways)
But all too often the need for pace makes for a seeming “tear-jerker,” which the story isn’t. It’s paradoxically a story about courage; Florence shows remarkable strength, which is part of Fitzgerald’s point. All Florence’s courage avails her nothing. Commercialization also demands a happy ending, uplift, hope, so a scene is tacked on at the end of Christine having grown up and from her experience learnt to love books, to read, and open a successful bookshop. The real world of the novel has Christine pushed into forgetting about the shop and Florence ending quietly but in anguish standing with her one suitcase waiting for a bus to take her to another town. The worst change is Coixet has Christine set fire to the bookshop: Mrs Gamart’s excuse was she was going to open an art center in the old house. I asked a friend I was sitting next to, how that helped? or had any meaning except (exciting to witness?) arson, for Florence would lose all whether the building lasted or not. My friend said to many people this means that at least Mrs Gamart will not be able to get her hands on the building. The central idea is Mrs Gamart wanted control and power; she didn’t care in the least about the building; she wanted to get rid of Florence and her bookshop.
OTOH, to give the movie its due (and so often when one compares a book to its film adaptation, it’s an undermining process), a reader can come away from the book feeling a horrible witch-like woman malevolently destroyed another, a sort of misogynistic perspective (soap opera like). The movie makes sure we feel that Mrs Gamart could not have done what she did by emphasizing how all the various characters cooperated in the destruction of Florence. We see them at work while in the book we only gradually understand their treachery. The movie also brings back all the faces in juxtaposed stills just before we last see Florence carrying her suitcase to a ferry. Mrs Gamart could not have done it alone. In the movie even Christine’s mother participates in destroying Florence with less reason (the book brings in how Christine fails her 11-plus and how unjust the 11-plus system is).
Florence dreaming in one of the movies’ early cheerful scenes
The powerful fable hits us strongly in the gut because as with the book, Mr Brundish’s attempt to help Florence, the first time he has left his house in years, ends in his having a heart attack. He is that upset by Mrs Gamart’s performance of surprised innocence. And Coixet socks this loss of her one true friend to Florence as she adds Mr Gamart coming to the shop to lie to Florence to tell her that Mr Brundish had visited his wife to give her his support for an art center. Florence has no proof, and she becomes (at last) hysterical and screams “Get out,” and ejects the wicked old man forcibly.
There is a good movie about American black people making the rounds this summer called Get Out (which I advise my reader not to miss); also be sure and see So Sorry to Bother You.
By contrast, Puzzle is puzzling. It may be that I need to see the 2009 Rompecabezas from Argentinean writer/director Natalia Smirnoff (a woman) to grasp why for at least one-half of the film we are in time warp: Agnes is a Donna Reed character, dressing and acting like a woman of the 1950s. Why Lemire is not bothered by this unreality I don’t know. It is improbable that in 2018 Agnes should be so obedient to her husband; it seems utterly in another era when we find that she and her husband are not determined both their sons should go to college, but that the notion of college is one that needs to be introduced. Agnes is also made into a bingo-playing priest-friendly church-going Catholic:
who hides her least unconventionality in dreamy vulnerable-heroine moods:
Agnes’s one outlet is to do puzzles, of which she has many secreted away for afternoon bouts. Now it is not improbable that she might answer an ad in the newspaper by someone asking for a partner to do puzzles with for a contest, but could this woman suddenly start to deceive her husband, lie all the time in all sorts of ways in order to gain free time to take the train into NYC and begin a partnership with a completely unknown Arab man. Irrfan Khan has been in so many brilliant Eurocentric films (Namesake, The Lunchbox), showing virtuosity (he is usually as in this film kind, attractive, reasoning but can be vicious as in Slumdog Millionaire) that he carries off the character as utterly non-threatening. I find him very attractive and have been told the actor is a type found in Indian films: the intellectual.
The insistence in the film on then bringing out how Agnes immediately resorts to lying rather than saying she is going to NYC to participate in puzzle contests, how her husband is utterly faithful to her and never distrusts her (he feels only she gives of herself to others and not him too much), and then is willing to sell his favorite summer house to please her to get money to do something in the career area for the sons, gives the game away. Also the intense sympathy given the husband who we see as within all his capabilities as meaning well as possible and even forebearing for not beating her (that’s how it’s presented). He says he can’t do it because he’s just not like his father.
This is a film (like Ladybird [scroll down]) masquerading as a woman’s film or point of view when it is told from the male point of view. The review on IMDB asked if the story is not about selfishness (hers) and deceit. For in the second half, as she begins to enjoy life doing puzzles, enjoys being independent, and especially winning she does start an affair with Robert. It quickly emerges that he is lonely, having been left by his wife. All these hard-hearted wives, you see.
Look at the promotional shot above: is she not coyly flirting?
The looming climax comes when Agnes and Robert have won to the point they must go to Belgium to be part of the final contest. It’s then Agnes must tell her Louie, but we are led to believe that guilt stops her from being willing to go to Europe with Robert. She does not phone him when she is supposed to, she looks very reluctant. We might think she won’t leave her sons, and is going make sure about half the money will be used to send Ziggy whom her husband had insisted work in his shop to college to become a cook. That is what Ziggy loves to do, and what his father regards as unmanly and therefore unacceptable. Some of the other half (we are to assume) will go to Gabe who wants to travel around the world or the US with a vegetarian girlfriend.
I say some because just as we assume she is going to stay with her long-suffering if dull husband, we see her waiting for a train to go somewhere. We then see an airport and think to ourselves she is after all joining the disappointed Robert. But no, she is going to Montreal. She has to keep aside some of the money for herself, no?
Now, Montreal? There is a dialogue early in the film where she expresses a desire to Ziggy to go to Montreal on her own. Why? we are not told. To do what? we are not told that. I happen to know Montreal is a little north from the borders of Canada and cold. The radical point is that she is not going to escape the husband by running to the arms of a lover. But we are not told what are her ambitions or why? the ending reminded me of Ibsen’s Doll House where it’s enough that Nora goes out of the house, slamming the door behind her. The problem is this is not 1879 and a satisfied sly smile on MacDonald’s face aboard a plane to Montreal is not enough.
I don’t want to condemn the film as it is filled with quiet nuanced scenes, and slowly builds to an interesting ending, but suggest those who are praising it are doing so as a contrast to the perpetual high violence, action-adventure fascistic point of view of so many movies nowadays. It’s a gentle film, intelligently done, slowly unwinding itself. My favorite line: when Louie finally asks Agnes, “Are you having an affair,” all she can say is she “thinks” she is (not sure which astounds Louie) because what she has been doing is puzzles with someone and yes they did have sex but she “didn’t like it very much.” Now those are a woman’s lines.
I thought of Margaret Drabble’s The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws. Drabble turns to jigsaws to calm herself.
Are they a game? I think so: Drabble finds the earliest modern style puzzles are found in the Renaissance and first spread as a child’s game (think of the Alphabets in Austen’s Emma). Drabble suggests for the adult that you are working against the puzzle maker. You achieve something when all the pieces are in place. I like to do puzzles and my method resembles Agnes’s: first she makes the frame and then she works on different portions of the picture. Of course the puzzle maker makes this second step hard and now you must follow the colors. For me since the competition is at a distance (I don’t go in for contests), it’s relaxed and I have aesthetic pleasure putting the puzzle together. It’s a rare game I enjoy.
In Puzzle Robert teaches Agnes to follow the colors first, only when the competition begins she reverts. She trusts to her own instincts and methods — so there is a feminist “feel.” Robert also tells Agnes he does puzzles to give shape and meaning to life but does not elaborate on this idea, and it does not make as much sense as Drabble’s explanation.
Gentle reader, both these movies are worth going to see — as well as Get Out and So Sorry to Bother You. You can escape the Trumpite poisoned environment we live in in the US today to learn about living in normally hard worlds.
Ellen
Susan Turner: Interesting book The Bookshop. Look forward to seeing how it translates to film. Love Bill Nighy though!
Camille De Fleurville Ellen “owns” reading lists where we … read together if we choose. And discuss the books we read as well as political matters, art, movies, travels, etc. It is women related. We read The Bookshop and other Penelope Fitzgerald’s books a few years ago. We are reading The Soul of Kindness (Elizabeth Taylor) now on one of the lists/reading group (WomenWriters@groups.io) and we are going to embark on Howard’s End (EM Forster) next Sunday (on the TrollopeandHisContemporaries@groups.io).
Oh, Ellen, I wrote a lengthy & “brilliant” comment & when I clicked Post Comment I got the message ” Sorry, could not be posted” & then it vanished. I am sorry too. No time to reconstruct now. Judith
I am sorry too. I have no idea why this happened. It happens to me. What I do if my comment has become long (when I can remember) is first copy and paste the posting onto a word file, leave it there unsaved and click “post.” Then if I am refused I don’t lose it. I admit I sometimes forget. If you have time another part of today or another day if you can tell me what you said more briefly I’d appreciate it. I think these two movies bring out aspects of womens’ lives (and Fitzgerald’s book) are are insufficiently presented any where. I hope you are well.
I saw Puzzle yesterday with a friend. We enjoyed it, especially because we are both in a small jigsaw group that meets at my house every week for wine & fine art puzzles, which I select (my house), though sometimes someone else chooses a puzzle. We sip wine, chit-chat, frame it in first, & one woman puzzles fast & furiously by shape. I work by color & enjoy the very close look at the painting to see how the artist worked. In the movie the pieces appeared to be all the same size & shape. We like those with odd sized & shaped pieces. It was wonderful to watch Agnes outgrow her constricting shell of marriage, motherhood, church servitude & dare to set off on her path. She eventually grew beyond the puzzle & the lover (played by wonderful Irrfan Khan). We thought perhaps she would see Montreal a few days & then get a bookkeeping job there, or maybe she returned home & whipped her family into shape, helped Louie lose weight, saved the garage, got a job & went to school herself. I think she survived after Montreal. I look forward to seeing The Bookshop ( which I have read) & also The Wife when they both open here. I hope these thoughts will post but I’m copying them first in case… Thanks Ellen for your very insightful reviews.
Thank you for repeating it. Yes I did think to myself, maybe we are to feel Agnes had a good time in Montreal — Izzy betook herself to Ontario for a 3 day vacation by herself one year — and then came back to work more independently and get her husband’s garage out of debt, help her son become a cook, and herself live to make far less heavy meals. She has made a decision not to shape her life by a man any more.
I found the idea that one could do a puzzle by colors a little puzzling. I do it first by frame so maybe it’s what you do first. Then I stare at the picture and yes divide by general colors if I can. Then it’s a movement between shape and color. I love how when you put a piece in the right place suddenly the meaning of the piece in front of you comes out for the first time. In context. It seems to me maybe a weekly puzzle group would be more successful than a monthly book club — One Christmas after Jim died my neighbor across the street invited me over to her house and we did a puzzle all afternoon together.
That is how we started. Several Christmases ago I was working a big snow scene by myself before the gas logs. Friends, neighbors & family who dropped in or were here in the house, would pop in & with tea or eggnog or a glass of wine & sit a little while & place a few pieces. Then in dull dark January a neighbor & I started another one & then we invited a few friends who used to come to make jewelry or collages to come help us puzzle. A few friends of those earlier groups, who are not jigsaw fanciers, come occasionally for a glass of wine & “set-a-spell” on the sofa & catch up with us. We are not like the film’s contestants or dead serious bridge players. We like puzzles & art, but kibbutzing & political rants too. Some work by color patches. Me too often, but I also pay close attention to the image of the painting. We just finished a gorgeous Jacobean crewelwork bouquet & tomorrow night will start The Birth of Venus. I am looking forward to that, as a Frida Kahlo self portrait I wanted to do, was over-ruled for now. We have fun. I yawn for an hr. or so before they give up & go home. So far I’ve not set a time limit.
It sounds wonderful. I ought to keep an eye out in the two OLLIs if I see any club like that. They do run clubs: I’m not the temperament to start a club, but I could follow someone. I’m now wondering how much a film like Puzzle is fueled by the knowledge that a sizable enough number of people like doing them. I know there are plenty of 1000 piece puzzles out there.
I should say both daughters had a period where they did puzzles. Both aged around 15-16. It helped them through difficult years. I was probably 15 when I used to do them too.
I started younger with very childish ones: nursery rhyme scenes & a map of the USA. I re’c’d a new one every Christmas & sometimes more if I had a birthday party. With an allowance, I could buy new ones myself at the ten cent store, scenes or cartoons of Little Lulu & Bugs Bunny. This was before tv & we worked puzzles when we were home sick or in bad weather while listening to the radio. Now I post pix of our finished ones on facebook & people comment about how hard this or that one looks or say they’re going to try it & ask where to buy them. I like Eurographics for their odd shaped pieces & fine art images & order online from Serious Puzzles or Puzzle Warehouse or ebay. My challenge is to see how the artist created the painting & the sense of accomplishing the finished artwork. I’ll ask everyone else why they like puzzling so much. Two yrs. ago, we completed “Portrait of Ira” by Tamara de Limpica, a woman in a clingy white dress with a bouquet of calla lilies, which I can’t bring myself to take apart & put away. We had to get a large piece of foamcore to place over it to work on new ones. I don’t want to glue it together as I might work it again someday. It is more a pleasing past time than a game for me. I have always enjoyed working jigsaw puzzles alone or with others, but never ever at speed. I have Margaret Drabble’s book around here somewhere & hope I can find it to read at last.
The Drabble book is a wonderful book: she is brilliantly philosophic about puzzles, very witty too. Yes the conflict whether to glue the picture together or just leave it for a time and then mix it up so you can do it again. I prefer genuine paintings. My neighbors buys European boxes I know.
Are you on face-book? are we FB friends there? I don’t think so as I’ve never seen these images. I’ll look for you.
I just looked and couldnt find you. Here’s mine: https://www.facebook.com/ellen.moody.58
You’ve cheered my evening.
I am now following you. Didn’t see a way to “friend request”. I am Judith Moore Cheney & Judith Cheney Artist. I’ll post the crewel work later today. Off to art group now.
Morning again. I’ll try again. Do you have the URL to your timeline? if so, that never fails. There are other Judith Cheny’s on face-book. I should take art courses more in the OLLIS at Mason and AU. Something to think about for the future.
Reviews are beginning to come in: https://slate.com/culture/2018/08/the-bookshop-movie-and-novel-by-penelope-fitzgerald-compared.html
My reply:
Yes the movie is far more optimistic, incomparably so — -though it keeps the terrifying plot. It eliminates the deep scepticism towards books and reading that paradoxically fuels Florence’s desire to open a bookshop; it eliminates the mean poltergeist (which Kaflka like suggests the universe has it in for Florence. More like the recent La Religieuse (2013), which I watched last night we have the theme of the courage of the victim; Florence is represented deeply strong and courageous (as is Suzanne Simonin in the film of Diderot’s La Religieuse). Well that is in the book but by no means the theme or emphatic; the theme is Florence is destroyed anyway as is Suzanne.The recent La Religieuse has a melancholy but happy ending; not so Rivette in 1966 and not so Fitzgerald’s book or Diderot’s. Nonetheless, very worth going to see.
“I’d like to add a comment about Kafka, esp in relation to The Trial. Having studied it for some time now, I beginning to think that Kafka’s pessimism is a comment on what the modern world has become — a world in which people are alienated and dehumanized. In the parable of the law within the novel, there is a glimmer of hope, of light. But the world has been constructed in such a way that we are not provided access to that light, to the genuinely sacred. That is the tragedy.
Elaine”
Ellen, my fb url is: http://www.facebook.com/judith.cheney they have redesigned my pages Again! It is very irritating. I do not see anywhere to make a friend request anymore. I will ask my son how you do it now….
I’m now “following” you and have sent you a message (in the face-book message page). That’s the best we can do: “follow” one another; that means notifications in the form of emails I suppose.
[…] veuve.” I saw the excellent film adaptation by Isabel Croixet of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop in last week’s film club, and Emily Mortimer as Florence Green uttered a line from the book […]
Diane Reynolds:
“I enjoyed The Bookshop very much. It was slow in spots, but I like that. I am not one for the endless bang bang. It was visually quite beautiful, both in setting and costume. I am glad to see the softer, more floral kinds of clothing I like coming back into fashion (seemingly) … . I thought the acting was very strong. I thought the film heightened—made less quiet and diffuse—exactly what the novel was about.I read the novel three years ago, and I understood then the petty and mean small town politics well enough. I couldn’t help but identify with Florence.
My husband, Roger was disturbed at how darkly it ended—that nobody but nobody got their comeuppance—that even burning down the building wouldn’t matter because nobody was bothered about the building—they just spitefully wanted Florence not to have it.
I knew the ending of the book and film, so wasn’t bothered. My main bother was that it obviously was not shot on the fens. I kept thinking it was filmed in Dingle, Ireland, where we have visited, though that didn’t seem quite right either—but I was right about Ireland … Ah well. I do continue to wonder why people must be punished for quietly going about doing what they love.”
The Bookshop is a novel about invisible power, power outside the visible structures; that is where women have operated and where they can strike hard. I am surprised Roger was disturbed at the dark ending of the film. It’s nothing to the famous 1960s British documentary, Cathy comes Home where the heroine also ends up in a train or bus station. I see he was not fooled by the burning down of the building. But one of the novel’s central theses is it does not matter how hard you work, how much you are qualified when it comes to worldly success. On Fitzgerald’s oeuvre: her houseboat, or Offshore (as it’s called), which won the Booker is if anything rightly darker.
It’s an offense not to spend your life making money. Those who do maybe partly hate that and they resent anyone who finds joy. How dare you? who do you think you are? It’s the idea only the rich are free, but the ironic truth is they are not free in other ways.
[…] ended for me with four (that’s four) spectacularly good women’s films: Puzzle, The Bookstop, The Dressmaker and The Wife (I’ll write on the latter two next week) Fall theater, movies, […]
When I saw this review in TLS, I thought she is just perfect to review this film: her _The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History of Jigsaws_ has become my favorite of her books. Alas it is behind the paywall: September 7, 2018.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/escape-routes-2/
So I’ll say Drabble does more than justice to the nuances of the film’s scenes, the good performances, but I am with her in being slightly horrified that even puzzle making is become a competitive sport. Puzzle making is a solitary or at most family activity, the point is to waste time pleasant in picture discovery, not speed but discovery — the enjoyment is to have it in front of you and it slowly form — like Sondheim’s recreation of Sunday in the Park with George on stage.
Drabble doesn’t go to the trouble of truly delving how puzzles can function in lives — hers too — but at least she brings it up. Perhaps one of the failures of the movie beyond the odd replacement of the 1950s for today in the first half is that this aspect is not gone into. We see Irrfan Khan is a reclusive inventor, but again his private inner life apart from his story of how his wife left him, is not delved. There is no novel, only a previous movie.
Ellen
[…] to see! the outstanding best of those I’ve not blogged about (I managed only women’s films) have been Paths of Glory, Judgment at Nuremburg, A Dry White Season (this last by a woman, 1989 […]
[…] have won the prize had it been given to Americans at the time. Our novels: Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop; J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country; Julian Barnes’s A Sense of an Ending, and a Merchant-Ivory […]
[…] Emily Mortimer as Florence Green in the meadow contemplating opening her bookshop (2017, The Bookshop) […]
[…] the movie, Belle. This blog is a corrective, a qualifier of the one I wrote on the movie and book last summer. This time I take seriously poltergeist in Fitzgerald’s novella, align the novella with […]
[…] Gray’s film. We had new insights into Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop, and people loved that film too (I showed clips). The applause and praise were music to my soul, and (not too ethereal) I had […]