Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are watching Comfy, Cozy movies this September and October and this week we are discussing Ladies in Lavender.

Ladies in Lavender stars Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. It was released in 2004 and was written and directed by Charles Dance, who is also a well-known British actor (Game of Thrones).  It was his directorial debut. The screenplay that Dance wrote, according to information online, is based on a short story by the same name written by William Locke in 1908. I also thought it was interesting to find out that a play based on the movie was later developed.

 I watched it on Amazon Prime for free (with a membership) but it is also free on Peacock, Tubi, the Roku Channel, and PlutoTV.

Janet (Maggie Smith) and Ursula Widdington (Judi Dench) are spinster sisters living in a small coastal English town. Their life is pretty slow and mundane from what we can tell at first. They clean and knit and have tea but not much else.

One morning Ursula is looking out her upstairs window when she sees a man on the beach. She and her sister run to him and with the help of the local doctor bring him inside. They believe he’s been washed up from a shipwreck of some sort.

As they nurse him back to health they realize he doesn’t speak English. After some effort they discover he speaks Polish and his name is Andrea (Daniel César Martín Brühl González – A German/Spanish actor who is known to comic book fans as Helmut Zemo/Baron Zemo).

Since this is right before World War II this makes the people in the small town a bit anxious when they learn of where he’s from later on. It doesn’t help that there is also a woman living in the area who speaks German. This puts everyone on edge but at the same time, people begin to like Andrea when he is able to move around.

First, he is nursed back to health by Janet and Ursula and Ursula teaches him some English.

At one point Janet is playing piano downstairs. Andrea has been upstairs recovering and when he hears the music he covers his ears and asks for it to stop. Janet has a book of German and knows a few words so she finds a way to communicate with him and learns he loves music but prefers the violin. So the ladies find the local fiddler player who plays a few tunes for the recovering Andrea. We can tell that Andrea is trying to be polite but that he’s not excited by the man’s inferior performance. He asks if he can play the fiddle and ends up kicking a much more polished and classical version of the folk song out, which tells us he is an accomplished violinist.

I won’t lie – I did worry that this movie was going to go a bit weird at one point because Andrea had to stay with the sisters while he recovered and Ursula became very infatuated with him but it didn’t go where I worried it would.

To explain a bit without giving too much away – Judi Dench’s character becomes enamored with Andrea and though she knows she’s too old for him she sort of imagines what it would like to be younger and be able to fall in love with him.

Both she and her sister really become attached to him but more in a matronly way for Maggie Smith’s character. They both want to take care of him. He brings such happiness and love into their lonely lives. He brightens their otherwise mundane existence and reveals to them experiences they never had – being wives and mothers.

They are afraid he will leave them when they see his talent and they see the German woman, who is also an artist, speaking to him and becoming friends with him.

This is a very artistic movie with beautiful scenery, superb acting, and a sweet story. I wouldn’t say it is the best movie I’ve ever seen as if feels like there was more that could have been done with some of the characters – especially Andrea who I would have liked to know more about in regards to his background and upbringing.

Still, I enjoyed this one and find it a very comfy, cozy watch since the characters are so endearing. The sisters are caring and sweet in their own ways and the housekeeper is very funny. She’s a bit rough on the edges but even she becomes attached to Andrea.

The short story that the movie was based on was first published in Collier’s magazine and later included in a book of other short stories by Locke called Faraway Stories in 1916.

Dance said Smith and Dench were the only ones considered for the roles and if he had not been able to get them, he wouldn’t have made the movie. He asked them when they were in a play together and accepted the offer without even seeing the script.

This was González’s first English-speaking movie. I also thought it was very interesting that he did not play the violin in the movie. Instead, it was the famous violinist Joshua Bell.

I thought it was interesting that we chose this as a comfy, cozy movie for this year and a New York Times critic said of the movie “[Dench and Smith] sink into their roles as comfortably as house cats burrowing into a down quilt on a windswept, rainy night… This amiably far-fetched film… heralds the return of the Comfy Movie…”

To read Erin’s take on the movie, click here:https://crackercrumblife.com/2024/09/26/comfy-cozy-cinema-ladies-in-lavender/

Next up on our Comfy, Cozy Cinema is Kiki’s Delivery Service.

And here is a list of the rest of the movies we are watching through November.

Feel free to link up your own impressions of the movies at our link-ups. The links close at the end of the week but feel free to leave your blog post on future link-ups, even if it is for another movie.

https://fresh.inlinkz.com/js/widget/load.js?id=c0efdbe6b4add43dd7ef