In “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont,” Joan Plowright plays an elderly widow who moves to London in search of culture, like minds and the company of her only grandson, Desmond.
But the elegant hotel she anticipated turns out to be a shabby pensioners home, its residents a waxworks of empire-in-decline types (one is even a ruddy-cheeked major) and young Desmond a no-show.
Just as the reality of her new life is beginning to sink in, she falls into an unlikely friendship with Ludovic Meyer (Rupert Friend), an aspiring writer roughly a quarter her age.
Ludo is a soul whose art and sensibilities seem to require that he live in this century as though it were the last. So he spends his days pounding out stories on a creaky manual typewriter, busking in the subway and breaking his mum’s heart.
When Mrs. Palfrey trips and falls in front of his apartment one afternoon, Ludo invites her inside for some tea and sympathy. Soon he’s happily impersonating Desmond for the benefit of Mrs. Palfrey’s new chums, transforming himself into the “mythical grandson” of the
Claremont’s collective dreams.
Directed by Dan Ireland, “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont” is a low-key weepy about loneliness and (possibly) learning to conform one’s romantic expectations to reality. The loneliness – thanks largely to Plowright’s affecting performance – it does well.
Plowright and Friend’s warm connection makes their friendship plausible, especially as the actress beautifully calibrates the ratio of shy hesitation, grandmotherly doting and urbane camaraderie that characterizes her affection for the lad.
But it’s harder to buy the movie in a larger context, as the world its protagonists inhabit bears little resemblance to the real one. It’s not just that most of the secondary characters seem to have wandered out of the pages of an Agatha Christie novel or a mid-’70s Mike Leigh set. It’s that their expectations of life are just enough out of step with the contemporary world to make them seem eccentric, if not cracked.
It helps to know that the story, adapted from a book by British novelist Elizabeth Taylor, was written in the 1970s and set in the ’50s. The movie has been transposed to the present day, but it hasn’t quite been adapted.
Contemporary life barely intrudes on the faded-chintz gentility that dominates the screen, so London seems not frozen in time so much as suspended in no time at all. I see the buildings, but where is England?
“Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont” | * RATING
UNRATED |1 hour, 47 minutes|DRAMA|Directed by Dan Ireland; screenplay by Ruth Sacks; starring Joan Plowright and Rupert Friend. |Opens today at the Chez Artiste.
