I must come out of the ciao wilderness soon and write another review:-)
I must come out of the ciao wilderness soon and write another review:-)
Member since:31.03.2001
Reviews:107
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I was looking forward to watching Charlotte Gray. It was a film I’d wanted to see at the cinema, but hadn’t got round to. I ended up disappointed by it. It wasn’t truly awful I was able to watch it without thinking ‘god when is this going to end’. It was just not as good as I thought it would be.
It’s hard to think what went wrong with it. It’s got all the ingredients for a good film: wartime drama, love interest, secret missions. However, it was strangely flat in a lot of places.
Charlotte Gray (Cate Blanchet) is a young scottish woman working at a surgery in wartime London. Whilst returning to London from a holiday in Scotland a ‘civil servant/spy master’ spots her reading a French book, it turns out that she studied in France. He invites her to a book launch where she meets and falls in love with Peter,
an RAF airman.
She is offered the chance to train as an agent with the aim of working alongside the resistance in the Vichy controlled part of occupied France. She decides to take them up on this and begins a series of training exercises and assessments.
During this time Peter’s plane is shot down over France. She manages to find out that radio contact has been made with him in somewhere called Jenesse in France. So now Charlotte has a secret.secret mission to go along with her secret mission. She wants to try and find word of Peter whilst she is in France.
She is given a cover identity, dropped into France and picked up by the local resistance. This resistance group is led by Julio, a committed communist. The village she is dropped into pretty, pretty think Year in Provence country. The surroundings are all very traditionally French and villagey.
Charlotte’s first action as a spy is a bit of a disaster. She meets her contract Francoise in a cafe. When Francoise gets up to leave Charlotte delays her by asking if she knows anything about the whereabouts of Peter. During this delay gendames enter the cafe to do an ID check. Francoise is arrested.
She is given a new cover as housekeeper to Julio’s grumpy, anti social dad, who is hiding two Jewish boys in his house. By now the film seems to be going a little bit slowly. There’s a bit of drama when Charlotte helps to blow up a troop train, but still it plods along a bit.
Charlotte asks her new English contact for news of Peter. He gives her news of his death in his plane’s crash. In meeting him to get this news she is late for a meeting with Julio. There is a knock on effect meaning that Julio is late meeting his resistance friends, where they will all be receiving a drop together. He watches the Germans shoot his friends and gets upset thinking that Charlotte has betrayed them. He threatens her with a gun and is calmed down by his dad, the few bits of only real tension in this film.
Charlotte realises a local teacher knows they are hiding the two boys, they are quickly moved. However the next day officials turn up with a Jewish quota in mind. They arrest Julio’s dad for having Jewish grandparents, his son is classed as non Jewish enough to remain free.
I'll leave the plot there, don’t want to give too much away. One of the things about this film is the lack of emotions. Charlotte and Julio seem almost wooden a lot of time.They’re under extreme pressure, but there isn’t even the hint of repressed emotion. Cate Blanchet gives the impression that she is doing nothing more nerve racking then going to an important job interview.
There is a spark between Julio and Charlotte that is hinted at and slowly developed during the film. There is a rocky relationship between Julio and his father, but that isn’t really developed. Because these characters seem unemotional, you don’t really identify with them or care about what will happen to them.
I suppose in lots of old black and white war films everyone was upright and quite unemotional, but there was a bit of action to counter this. Apart from the blowing up of the train and the failed drop this film had little excitement to it. It’s a film of a book written by Sebastin Faulks, so I may just have to read the book to see how it compares.
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Production Year: 1957 - Drama - Director: Leo McCarey - Original Language: English - Classification: Universal - Starring: Cathleen Nesbitt, Deborah Kerr, Cary Grant, Richard Denning, Neva Patterson, Fortunio Bonanova
Production Year: 2004 - Drama - Director: Nick Cassavetes - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over, 12 years and over - Starring: Rachel McAdams, Ryan Gosling, Gena Rowlands
![Charlotte Gray [DVD] [2002]](http://picnicb.ciao.com/uk/78528481.jpg "Charlotte Gray [DVD] [2002]")
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