Charity's Place

CALENDAR GIRLS

REVIEWED BY CHARITY BISHOP

Our rating: 2 out of 5

Because of: nudity

Rated:

About ten years ago, a group of ambitious women created a stir in England that soon spilled over into the United States and became an international event. Their charity drive to raise enough money to purchase a sofa for the local "family waiting room" at the cancer ward of the hospital made over $10,000 in profits, and after several years they were able to build a new hospital wing, much less a sofa. Sounds like a good plot for a movie, doesn't it?

Every few weeks is a meeting of the Rylstone Women's Institute, in which no end of tedious speakers bore the participants with lectures on everything from making tea cozies to the latest kitchen detergent. Having joined up years before in order to please her mother, who has since passed away, Chris Harper (Helen Mirren) is thoroughly tired of the non-productive process. Her past suggestions have never been accepted with much enthusiasm, but she has the support of her best friend Annie Clark (Julie Walters), who one day returns home to find her husband's suitcase on the landing. He's not leaving her, but has been accepted into the cancer ward of the hospital. As Annie spends countless hours in the waiting room on a terrible, old, broken down couch, she realizes that this may be the last few months of married life.

With her husband's death, Annie shows very little interest in much of anything until Chris comes up with the idea that the girls should sell a calendar to make enough profit to purchase the hospital a new couch, and therefore provide some little comfort for the families of the occupants. Her plan just has one catch, something none of the ladies are very pleased about -- it's going to be a nude calendar, revealing just a little but not too much, of women in their older years and in the full bloom of life. The head of the RWI is horrified when she finds out, but there's not much she can do to stand in their way. Little do Annie and Chris know that their one-time event will transform into a major media phenomenon.

Allow me to state one thing right off ... I do not approve of their actions, however noble their intentions. That being said, the movie has surprising emotion behind it. What I did like about it was its emphasis on friendship, forgiveness, and learning the importance of family. I liked that Chris' husband wanted success for her, not necessarily in the way she got it, but still that he stood behind her when she needed him to. I also enjoyed Annie holding her accountable when things got way out of line. The first half hour of the film in particular is a delight, with so much humor and charm as we come to know and love each of the characters. But then it steers into calendar territory, complete with nervous photo shoots and the resulting shots plastered all over the newspapers. There is a great deal of partial nudity, because the women stand behind objects to block complete views of their breasts. Even as tasteful as they tried to make it, it still made me uncomfortable and even embarrassed for the actresses.

There are a couple of instances of full upper nudity (one of them is in a briefly-shown photograph when a model was startled; the other has some porno magazines involved) and one shot of a nude woman from behind. Some innuendo is present, as well as two boys on the bus trying to figure out what to compare a female classmate's breasts with. There's quite a bit of British profanity ("bloody," etc) and a handful of profanities. I liked the first part of the movie, and wished on several occasions that it had been anything but a nude calendar, because I approve of their hope of raising enough money to help the hospital. But in many ways, the film was just traumatic enough to leave a lingering impression, and it wasn't exactly a positive one.