
'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society' is a film as vapid and pretentious as its awfully quirky title. By turns attempting to be a rural versus urban romance, an ode to books and their capacity to heal and unite, and a wartime mystery; it ends up being little more than an elaborate collection of beautiful 40s fashion and sensuous visual porn with over-curated landscapes and sets. Lily James' terribly mannered portrayal of the female protagonist is ingratiating. She underscores every emotion with overt expression to the point where it becomes not just exhausting but ridiculous--a scene where she hams her way through a writing frenzy is particularly laughable--and this approach is ably aided and abetted by the director's own.
There is little at stake in the mystery that is supposed to propel this narrative forward. Both the director (Mike Newell) and the screenwriters (Don Roos, Kevin Hood, Thomas Bezucha) tell it in the most dull fashion: a question is set up in one scene and immediately answered in the next. The lead character's sleuthing amounts to little more than insistent questioning until she bores every one of the residents to revealing an answer... which is not surprising in the first place. This makes for tiresomely inert drama, with no room for character development worthy of the name. All this would have just added up to fatigue in any other film, but given that the very real traumas of World War II are the subject here, the Instagram-filter-approach is almost criminal in its watering down of the various issues the story touches upon (slavery, Nazis, the occupation). Ultimately, 'The Guernsey...' is like candy floss: pleasant to look at and overly saccharine, but also devoid of substance and likely to leave you feeling slightly ill. Be warned.
Genre: Drama, Romance, War
Language: English Runtime: 2h 4min Year of release: 2018 Streaming Platform: Netflix
Hot take is a series in which I offer my first impressions of films from India and around the world.
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