Their Finest

The title alludes to Britain’s Finest Hour, Churchill’s term for the nation’s valour and heroism in surviving the Nazis’ bombing during WW II. But the term applies to two other emerging forces as well.

One is The Movies, as the British government turned to film for the propagandist power the Nazis had already mobilized. This film shows the Brits developing an emotional feature film that will boost the besieged citizenry’s morale and also help to draw America out of its isolationism to support her. 

The second is the emergence of women as an assertive social and professional force. With the young men away at war or already killed, older men and women young and old got the opportunity to assume new responsibilities. They got the chance to prove themselves. As Phyl warns Catrin Cole, the men are ”afraid they won't be able to put us back in the box when this is over, and it makes them belligerent.” Modern feminism grew out of women’s emergence into the wartime labour market. Unsurprisingly, the film was scripted and directed by women. 

The film follows Catrin’s blossoming from secretary into excellent screenwriter and from a subservient position in her affair with a painter into independence. The typist grows into writer. The female characters’ incidental conversation, what the male writers call “slop,” develops into the work’s emotional heart, especially when Catrin provides the film’s close. Her new career sustains her in the face of both her romantic losses. So, too, Hilliard's agent's wife rises to take over her husband's business after his death -- without abandoning her old role as nurturer and woman. In contrast, Phyl seems to have assumed a tough shell -- but it cracks when she spurs Catrin back to Buckley. 

As her second love Buckley explains, people need films to bring a sense of order and coherence into their chaotic lives. Life is chaotic and senseless. Catrin loses both her lovers as a nod to the disorder in real life, for which films’ conventionally happy endings console us. So, too, the steady reports of the deaths of marginal characters. 

As the film intercuts scenes behind the making of the film with clips from that film itself we get a constant layering of reality and its simulations. Often a supposedly real-life scene appears staged, like the set in Hilliard’s visit to Catrin’s bare flat. Real-life dialogue breaks into script-like eruptions, like most of Hilliard’s and Buckley’s quips, life as spoken by an actor and a writer respectively. 

The emerging film’s liberties with the facts of the original story remind us that art presents general truths deeper than the facts of any particular case.  Of course art enhances reality. The twin sisters of the film are livelier, prettier and more successful than the shy girls whose failed adventure inspired the film. The handsome dashing American pilot imposed on the film for American interest is carefully trimmed and packaged, in effect disguised, to be effective.  

When Catrin finally goes to see her movie we see its audience — of course, a reflection of us as we watch the movie about their movie. Their emotions and engagement remind us of why we’re at that movie. Their shared experience reflects ours. 

In fact, evoking an emotional community is the function not just of films but of all the arts. (That’s why tyrants target the arts, to suppress alternative visions and to fragment their citizenry.) Hence the sentimental power when Hilliard sings his old folk ballad at the party. And the government official's stirring recitation of Hal's St Crispin's speech from Henry V. 
     Catrin’s first lover is an isolated artist, a painter, who does not work with a present audience and proves too selfish to sustain his relationship with Catrin. But he too succeeds by catching the spirit of the time, with paintings of the desolate British cityscapes and industrial scenes. The hopeful pop song Red Sails in the Sunset plays against the grey and ruins of the bombed city. The arts inflect our reality to make it bearable.   

It’s not surprising that this paean to England’s lost glory should be appearing now, on the eve of Brexit. What may surprise is that it’s directed not by a British super nationalist but by a Danish woman, Lone Scherfig. That could make this film an EU statement in appreciation of its departing member, perhaps a reminder that England can be its glorious self without leaving. But this might be pushing too far. Better to consign its politics to the vital social function of the arts and to the necessity of women’s self-realization.