Ladies in Lavender

What is it with the British and old ladies. They make far more movies about the lives of old women than we Americans, the Germans, the French, or just about anyone else.

Judi Dench takes some time off from playing "M" to Pierce Brosnan's James Bond in order to play an old woman living in a small Cornish fishing village with her sister, played by Maggie Smith, who is taking time off from playing Prof. Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter movies.

One morning the sisters arise to discover a body stranded on their patch of beach. Is he dead or alive? Just barely alive, they find, after getting him into their home and summoning the town doctor. He has an injured ankle and will be bedridden for a while.

It quickly becomes obvious that the two elderly women are competing for the handsome young man's attention. Dench's character actually seems to fall in love.

While the women are close in age, one difference between them is that the Maggie Smith character was apparently married at one time and lost her husband the First World War. The Dench character feels her loneliness and longing much more keenly, probably because she doesn't even have memories to comfort her.

The young man, it turns out is Polish, but they find a small patch of common ground in the fact that he also speaks fluent German and the Maggie Smith character knows a wee bit of this language. Of course, the fact that her sister can actually communicate with the boy creates a certain degree of jealousy of her sister.

By accident, it's discovered that the boy plays excellent violin. His playing catches the ear of an attractive summer visitor to the area, a Russian woman played by Natascha McElhone, who at least gives the sisters a common enemy. When she sends a letter to the cottage explaining that her brother is an important concert violinist, the girls hang on to the letter but query the boy as to whether he's familiar with this musician, and it turns out he's quite a fan. Do they pass the letter along? No, instead they collude to keep the information from him.

They aren't the only ones with concerns about the young woman. The local doctor, a 50-ish man, has designs on the Russian visitor and views the young man as competition. We sense he isn't above doing something underhanded to sidetrack the competition, even though we know it isn't competition that keeps her from being responsive to his advances.

And what about her? Does she have romantic designs on the boy? It would seem natural, but when he actually makes an advance, she cuts him short and sends him packing for the day with a curt "auf wiedersehen" (can be translated various ways, but in this context "till next time" works best). This is a rather mixed messages which adds a little intrigue to the movie.

So,. will the boy stay with the sisters (I think you know the answer to that one)? Will he run off with the Russian woman? Will he be arrested and packed off to Poland or Germany or even prison? Well, that's why you'll want to see this movie.

I'm not a big fan of movies about old ladies or life in small-town Great Britain, and yet I'm fascinated by psychology, and there's plenty of that to go around in this movie.