England,
1989, 145 min
Shown in 1990
CREDITS
- dir
-
Beeban Kidron
- prod
-
Phillippa Giles
- scr
-
Jeanette Winterson
- cam
-
Ian Punter
- editor
-
John Strickland
- cast
-
Geraldine McEwan, Charlotte Coleman, Emily Aston
- source
-
BBC Enterprises, 80 Wood Lane, London, W12 OTT, England, FAX: 10-749-7520
- gga award
-
Honorable Mention, Television: Television Feature
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Beeban Kidron attended the screening.
OTHER
This is an engagingly intelligent story of an independent-minded girl growing up in working-class Lancashire in the ’60s and ’70s. The all-woman team of director Beeban Kidron, writer Jeanette Winterson and producer Philippa Giles have, with rare facility, adapted Winterson's wryly witty autobiographical first novel, into three segments produced for the BBC. In the first part, young Jess (the charmingly natural Emily Aston) innocently absorbs her mother's fervently evangelical views, taking for granted a world of dotty streetcorner orchestra ladies, kindly, elderly churchwomen, and timid young "Limbs of Satan" (unsaved children). Jess' is largely a world of women (her mute lumpen-paterfamilias and a fire-breathing preacher are viturally the only exceptions) revolving around her dominating mother. A bravura performance by Geraldine McEwan balances the mother's fanaticism by drawing out her humor, energy and vulnerability. In the last two segments Jess (here admirably portrayed by Charlotte Colemen) reaches adolescence. When a gently budding romance between Jess and her girlfriend is made brutally public, she discovers the limited tolerance of her mother's fundamentalist world and must decide to remain within the fold or find her own way. This extended treatment of a unique young woman's experience is a refreshing change from the stream of cardboard bimbos, femmes fatales and victims continually extruded by the film industry.
—George Eldred
FACTOID #88
Steve Cochran, the American actor who starred in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1957 SFIFF entry Il Grido, demanded a private screening of the film before it could be shown to Festival audiences so he could ensure that scenes that had been censored in Italy had not been cut from the print. Cochran, who had American distribution rights to the film, got a screening’delaying the film’s 8:30 start time for ticketholders.
