Charlotte Gray

Next up was Charlotte Gray which I found among a pile of those give-away DVDs from the newspaper. When I remembered that it was based on Sebastian Faulks novel I decided to give it a go.

A young Scottish woman living in London falls in love with a handsome RAF pilot Peter, and the two are soon caught up in a torrid affair. 

Before long, Peter is sent off on a mission over France, and Charlotte receives word that Peter has been reported missing in action. Fluent in French and desperate to find the man she loves, Charlotte volunteers for work with British intelligence and is soon smuggled into France where she is to work with French resistance forces, posing as a woman from Paris.

 As Charlotte goes about her duties and tries to find Peter, she finds herself drawn to the difficult and highly principled Julien (Billy Crudup), a Communist working with resistance forces.

Charlotte is assigned to pose as a domestic at the home of Julien's father, Levade (Michael Gambon), where he's hiding two Jewish boys whose parents have been captured by Nazi troops.

 In order to maintain her cover and protect Julien, Levade, and the boys, Charlotte finds herself unwillingly drawn into a relationship with Renech (Anton Lesser), a busybody schoolteacher who is collaborationg with the occupation troops. Levade is interviewed about his Jewish ancestry, and when he stays silent, Julien admits the Jewish ancestry of both his father and himself in order to save the two little boys. Levade is then packed off to the prison camp, but Julien is not taken, as he is not Jewish enough, but his father is, according to the law. Following betrayal by the duplicitous schoolmaster Renech, the two boys are taken anyway.

 Charlotte writes a letter to them and signs it from their mother, knowing how much they miss her. She runs to pass it through a hole in the wall of the train cargo box they share with Julien's father and many others, all saying goodbye to loved ones running along with the train. At the end of the war, she is reunited with Peter, but she explains that she has grieved for him since she was told that he had died.

At the end of the film, Charlotte returns to France and to Julien.

Only Billy Crudup and Michael Gambon escape this film unscathed, both putting in excellent pitch-perfect performances. Cate Blanchett not only suffers from the worst  Scottish accent I've heard in a long while, it lapses into a full blown American twang at points (I am allowed to be critical when it's my own accent that's being butchered!) she also suffers from being completely and utterly wooden and unsympathetic. She also looks unfeasibly glamorous for someone being dropped by parachute into a Nazi-occupied rural French town. She would have been shot on sight in reality. This is no comparison to the book, it flags at too many points and the script is frankly dull. I'm reminded by this quote I saw recently;

"don't judge a book by its film!"

Read the book instead.