In April 1999 the real-life ladies of the Rylstone and District Women’s Institute in Yorkshire, England, produced a cheeky nude calendar to raise money for a hospital that had cared for one of their husbands before he died of cancer. They could hardly have known that their story, in the form of the movie Calendar Girls, was going to be the female Full Monty.
Or maybe they could. The ladies obviously had a brilliant, untrained knack for publicity and a shrewd sense of how appealing their naughty-but-nice calendar was going to be. They were pictured doing traditional Women’s Institute things like jam-making, but — yikes! — in a state of undress, concealed behind cider presses and what have you. It led to them being massively praised by newspaper columnists throughout the land, for raising money for charity and raising a smile at the same time. Without anyone explicitly making the connection, the courage involved in taking their clothes off was assumed to be related to the courage displayed by the husband, his wife and their friends and neighbours, and the combination of heartbreak and British wit and pluck was irresistible.
Calendar Girls is a genial comedy, directed by Nigel Cole, with an excellent, tightly constructed script by Tim Firth and Juliette Towhidi that accentuates the positive. There’s lots of wit and pluck and not much heartbreak. The uneasy suspicion that this nude calendar might actually be a delusional or even harmful way of avoiding grief is touched upon only briefly.
At the centre of the story are two best friends, Annie and Chris. Casting anyone but Julie Walters for the lead in a film like this is practically illegal and Walters does the picture proud as Annie, with her gutsy humour and iron-clad common sense concealing hurt and vulnerability. Helen Mirren is the glamorous Chris. Together they are stalwarts, if rather subversive stalwarts, of the Women’s Institute, giggling together at the back at the weekly meetings while someone gives an illustrated talk about broccoli. Chris is the wild child of the local branch: her one contribution has been to organise a vodka tasting, which led to unspecified calamity.
Their lives change when Annie’s gentle husband John, likably played by John Alderton, dies of cancer, filling the widow with a need to do something to fill the aching void in her heart. Between them, Chris and Annie come up with the idea of the calendar, roping in the sceptical and terrified Women’s Institute ladies as models. A terrific cast of character performers is assembled, including Linda Bassett, Penelope Wilton, Annette Crosbie and Celia Imrie. Again, as with Walters, not casting Imrie in this sort of film is unthinkable.
Calendar Girls is based on the now familiar template of British Embarrassment: butch men become male strippers; young lad becomes ballet dancer; respectable ladies take their clothes off. But with The Full Monty and Billy Elliot, the public performances come at the end. In Calendar Girls, the big revelation comes at the beginning. It’s the narrative reverse of striptease. The ladies remove their clothes and then put them back on again to face their families, their menfolk and the uptight hierarchy of the institute. The crisis is not the baring of bodies, but the baring of souls.
There is one acknowledgement of a darker and more complex story behind Calendar Girls: the suggestion that this whole thing, far from being a healthy and healing process, might be a vain, neurotic attempt to distract oneself from death and grief.
The movie version is great fun, but I suspect that its release might be another stage in a huge diversionary tactic whose consequences have yet to reveal themselves to the actual women involved. Like the ladies themselves, strategically hidden behind their jam jars and Eccles cakes, Calendar Girls does not reveal all. — Â