When I see an à l’ancien film like this Bad Guys, I can’t help but think of Truffaut and his anathema against the cinema from across the Channel, when a young Turk from the Parisian critics came out with the statement that «the English cinema does not exist” because the champion of the Nouvelle Vague could not accept films that had their pillars in a well-written screenplay, in professional acting, in a direction concerned above all with communicating with the public. In an “old-fashioned” cinema, in short.
Today times have changed, even the Nouvelle Vague has been contested and undermined by new ways of understanding cinema, but those old prejudices struggle to disappear and end up not appreciating the work of those who, as they once did, see in acting, in the construction of characters and of their respective characters, in the attention to the sets and costumes – in a word: in the pleasure of staging – one of the many ways of making cinema. As happens with this Wicked Little Letters (originally Wicked Little Letters) which the screenwriter Jonny Sweet based on a story that happened a hundred years ago in Littlehampton, Sussex and Thea Sharrock directed.
The devoted “Miss” Edith Swann (Olivia Colman, increasingly good) sees a series of anonymous letters delivered by post where she is addressed in the most vulgar and inventive ways possible. To define it as barracks or longshoreman language is to pay a compliment to that series of sexual insults that a mysterious hand takes it upon itself to write. If it were up to her, she would let it go, her Christian spirit advises her to forget and forgive, but her father, Edward (Timothy Spall, equally good), does not compromise: his daughter, who still lives with him and her mother (Gemma Jones) absolutely must file a complaint. Also because he has an idea of who the author, or rather the author, might be: his neighbor Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), who arrived from Ireland with her teenage daughter Nancy (Alisha Weir), without husband (who died in the war she says) and a young and handsome (coloured) companion (Malachi Kirby).
Truth be told, Edward’s suspicions they are rather certainties: Rose is too cheerful, too unscrupulous (she also frequents the pub and doesn’t disdain beer and darts) not to be the author of those letters. The public, however, is too intuitive not to understand that this accusation should not stand the test of facts, but on the one hand we are in post-war England where veterans – like Edward, who also had two sons who died at the front – are equated with national heroes and males (see the pompous head of the local police station) cannot even think of their word being questioned. And on the other hand, it is precisely the pleasure of that staging that I would define as “old-fashioned” that requires the pleasure of outlining the characters and sketching the psychologies to take its time. Almost as if she wanted to make the spectator believe that she herself, the mise-en-scène, ended up in the net of her own ability.
Then, however, other figures slowly take shape: that of the “female agent Gladys Moss” (Anjana Vasan), in history the first Sussex policewoman, and her friends Ann (Joanna Scanlan), Mabel (Eileen Atkins) and Kate (Lolly Adefope), all three convinced of Rose’s innocence and determined to avoid a sentence they consider unjust.
At a certain point in the film the real author of the anonymous letters is revealed to the public, who had intuited something (or even more), but it would be a mistake to mistake this film for a court drama or so. His strength (and his pleasure) are precisely in the way he outlines each character, imprints them in our minds, makes us take sides for this or that. Without forgetting every now and then to drop a note on women’s desire for redemption (that allusion to the tractors driven during the Great War, when there were no men to work. With the expectation that they would then return to their place) or male arrogance .
Tags: Badness home womens desire redemption oldfashioned comedy
