Reviewed by Neil Davey
Stars Marianne Faithful, Mike Maojlovic, Kevin Bishop,
Siobhan Hewlett, Dorka Gryllus, Jenny Agutter, Corey
Burke, Meg Wynn Owen, Susan Hitch, Flip Webster
Written by Martin Herron & Philippe Blasband
Certification UK 15 | US R
Runtime 103 minutes
Directed by Sam Garbarski
Let's hear it for the older woman. Indeed, let's give them a hand. After all, they'd do the same for us if Irina Palm, Sam Garbarski's surprisingly warming tale of pensioners, serious illness and hand jobs is to be believed.
It's a low-key movie about desperate times and desperate measures. And it's also about redemption being found in the most unexpected of places. Maggie (Faithful) is a dowdy widow. Life's never been great, and now the family is falling to pieces. Her young grandson Ollie (Burke) is dying, her son Tom (Bishop) is stressed, her daughter-in-law Sarah (Hewlett) resents her... Things are bleak.
Having already sold almost everything to fund Ollie's treatment, and having raised cash from the local community, they still haven't found a cure. There is one last hope though: an apparently successful programme in Melbourne. It's getting great results, Ollie qualifies: all they have to do then is pay for flights, and hotels, and food, and bills and...
Maggie thus decides she needs a job and, seeing a sign saying “Hostess Wanted” in a Soho club, she applies. The role, she assumes, means making tea. The role, as she learns, is giving hand jobs anonymously behind a glory hole.
It's not the role she envisaged, and it's not the role she ever saw herself in. But, trooper that she is, Maggie gets on with it and develops an organised — and wonderfully English — approach to the job, even down to the overalls and flask. The other unexpected aspect? It turns out she's a natural, so good in fact that she gets a stage name, a pay rise and has people queuing out the door. And slowly this dowdy, put-upon widow comes out of her shell, and finds herself taking control. Her friends might not approve — and there's a lovely scene where she sets out to shock them — but then her friends have never been that supportive. Maggie though is not just taking her clients in hand, she's got her life there too.
For the most part, Irina Palm is an unexpected delight. It is a little episodic, but the key scenes are so deftly handled and the moral of the story portrayed so warmly, it's very hard to resist. Faithful is unexpectedly great — the role's a lovely playful twist on her 1960s reputation, of course — and, if this oddly sweet little film had been made in Europe, people would be celebrating it from the rooftops. Here's hoping then that it doesn't get completely lost behind the week's blockbusters.