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Miss Pettigrew lives for a day |
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Friday, 16 May 2008 |
 Starring Frances McDormand, Amy Adams; Directed by Bharat Nalluri
It’s 1939, and Miss Pettigrew – the governess of last resort – has lost another job. With little option, she steals a business card and introduces herself to Delysia Lafosse, who is similarly constrained by circumstance. Living off the wealth of one man, she’s in bed with another but in love with a third. So it is that two very different people find themselves thrown together just when they need a little of the other in their life.
Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day is a curious film. It mixes screwball comedy with hysterical drama over a layer of melancholy. While much of the film is laboured, mawkish and predictable, it’s oddly compelling. McDormand’s negotiation of Pettigrew’s transformation is heart-warming, and Adams is delightful as the Monroe-esque scatterbrained starlet-on-the-make. Wish-fulfilment is everything, and much of the fun lies in the emergence of an ethically upright and socially downtrodden governess into a flamboyant world of loose money and looser morals.
Yes it’s horrendously contrived. Yes it’s arch and awkward. But there’s a tremendous driving energy that keeps the balls in the air, and if you’ve a taste for joyous gossip in a story awash with lies, deception and adultery, Miss Pettigrew is waiting to help you with your needs.
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