Dames At Sea
Dench, Smith, as spinster sisters highlight 'Ladies In Lavender'

There is nothing like a dame—unless it's two of them. The layered, wistful performances of Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith as aging spinster sisters are the main reasons to see Ladies In Lavender, a gentle-spirited fable of love, loss, awakenings, and regret that marks the writing-directing debut of actor Charles Dance.

The second most compelling reason is the wildly flinty and gorgeous seacoast of Cornwall, where the story takes place. It's a world apart from the rest of England, with its raging, debris-tossing storms, and sunlit greenwater coves nestled between gigantic rock formations that seem smacked out of the cliffsides by some impudent god-like hand. A West Country native, Dance portrays a Cornish landscape unchanged since the era of fairy tale, folklore, and Arthurian myth, a place where the possibility of magic shimmers like sea mist in the air.

In a solid stone cottage perched on a green cliff overlooking the sea live two sisters who could not, at first glance, seem any less ethereal. Tall, imposing, practical Janet (Smith), the elder, puts up with very little nonsense. Ursula (Dench) is the lifelong follower, although still given to moments of playfulness—splashing her sister with water on their daily trek to the pebbly beach. It's 1936, and while the news from Europe gets darker every day, the sisters exist in a benign time warp of routine in the home inherited from their parents where they've always lived together.

But everything changes the morning they find a half-drowned man washed up on their beach. The stranger they take into their home is young, alone, and speaks no English. Only gradually, they learn he's a Pole, Andrea (Daniel Bruhl, from Goodbye Lenin), who communicates in German, and has an extraordinary gift for playing the violin. (Maestro Joshua Bell plays violin on the soundtrack.) In company with the village doctor (David Warner), and their earthy housekeeper, Dorcas (Miriam Margolyes), Janet supervises Andrea's recovery with her typical briskness.

But to the far more sheltered and innocent Ursula, he becomes the unwitting catalyst for every suppressed girlish fantasy she's ever had. The delicate balance between the sisters skews as Ursula becomes more vulnerable, more easily wounded. Like a fairy changeling, Andrea beguiles the village as well, playing rollicking "fiddle" at the harvest dance, attracting the notice of Olga (Natascha McElhone), the sister of a famous concert violinist, who's enchanted by Andrea's playing. (When lovely, perfectly personable Olga comes to call, Ursula pouts "She's like a witch in a fairy tale!")

Adapting a short story by William J. Locke, Dance updated the period to the touchy political era between the wars, and made the sisters poignantly older. There are many directions the story might go, given and the mystery of Andrea's appearance (the assumption he's been shipwrecked is never verified). Dance leaves plot threads here and there, but they don't lead anywhere; for all he cares, the stranger might have fallen out of the skies. Andrea's impact on the sisters' lives is all that matters to Dance. We learn Janet once had a beau, killed in the previous war, but when Dorcas takes charge of putting Andrea to bed, saying he's got nothing she hasn't seen before, the sisters exchange a guarded look suggesting it's not the same for them. Going into the village to order him a suit of clothing, they're bewildered by the intimate details of men's haberdashery.

Dench's giddy Ursula gives the movie its heart, in the impulsively romantic way she plucks a daisy out of a vase to put on Andrea's breakfast tray, or the eagerness in her eyes when she makes flash cards to teach him English. She's not child-minded; she understands she's "an old woman." Yet the spark ignited so late in her life is as touching as it is "ridiculous."

This story is more about undercurrents than action; it could use a bit more complexity, or more magic. Ultimately it adds up to less than the sum of its parts, yet it's still an evocative fairy tale set not in the morning of youth, but the twilight of age.

LADIES IN LAVENDER With Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and Daniel Bruhl. Written and directed by Charles Dance. A Roadside Attractions release. Rated PG-13. 104 minutes. (***)
Review published in Good Times, May 19, 2005