There are few things more enjoyable than delighting in the undiscovered treasures found in a bookshop. Books let you explore, travel, experience, find solace, provide nourishment and inspiration, without moving your feet.
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The Bookshop is a film that delivers us the enchanting physicality of books while conveying the cinematic equivalent of that musty-book smell into our senses.
Based on Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel of the same name; The Bookshop is set in 1959. Florence Green (Emily Mortimer), a free-spirited, winsome widow, puts grief behind her and risks everything to open up a bookshop – the first such shop in the bucolic and sleepy Suffolk coastal village of Hardborough, England.
Fighting damp, cold and considerable local apathy she struggles to establish herself but soon her fortunes change for the better.
By exposing the narrow-minded local townsfolk to the best literature of the day including Nabokov’s scandalising Lolita and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, she opens their eyes thereby causing a cultural awakening in a town which has not changed for centuries.
Fahrenheit 451 is explicitly about the evils of censorship and the suppression of ideas which provides a meaningful backdrop to the stifling culture of Hardborough.
Florence brings a world of new ideas and feelings to the town. Her story exposes the diplomatic tyranny behind the English idyll, the gossip and refined manners that suffocate change and maintain ancient social arrangements.
Florence's activities bring her a kindred spirit and ally in the figure of Edmund Brundish (Bill Nighy). A notorious loner living in the square Gothic manse atop the hill, his letter-writing to Florence sets the stage for a sympathetic alliance. He too has a distaste for the town’s stale atmosphere.
But this mini social revolution soon brings her fierce enemies: she invites the hostility of the town’s less prosperous shopkeepers and also crosses Mrs. Gamart (Patricia Clarkson) a retired general’s wife and self-styled town leader. She is Hardborough’s vengeful, embittered alpha female who is herself an aspirant doyenne of the local arts scene.
When Florence refuses to bend to Gamart’s will, they begin a struggle not just for the bookshop but for the very heart and soul of the town.
Emily Mortimer delivers a performance of resounding clarity, charm and gentle strength. Nighy and Mortimer's scenes are the film's best: both actors morph delightfully into the nuances of their budding friendship.
The interactions between Florence and Mrs Garmart drip with polite conversations with both actors deftly conducting their conversations laced with passive-aggressive intent.
As with so many British movies, there are bittersweet moments in the film which also make it engaging if sometimes saddening.
The Bookshop is a sumptuous, gently provocative but heart-warming movie and is most endearing in its quaintness. It evokes the sensation of losing yourself in a good book.