The Bookshop

PAST FILM SCREENING

November 21 – 2PM + 7:30PM

UK/ Spain/ Germany, 2017 – Rated: PG – 113 minutes
English
Directed by Isabel Coixet
Cast: Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, Patricia Clarkson

Based on Penelope Fitzgerald’s eponymous, Booker Prize–nominated novel from 1978, The Bookshop acts as a love letter to literature and the importance of dreams. Director and screenwriter Isabel Coixet (Elegy; Learning to Drive) helms an adaptation that is brimming with colour, wit, and charm. Florence Green — played with effortless grace by Emily Mortimer (The Sense of an Ending; The Party) — is a young widow who shocks the residents of her rural English town by turning an old, weathered house into a bookshop. She faces vehement opposition from the town, especially from queen busybody Violet Gamart (Patricia Clarkson in her third collaboration with Coixet, after Elegy and Learning to Drive), but finds an unlikely supporter in Edmund Brundish (Bill Nighy, Their Finest; Pride), a bookish local recluse who takes up her cause. When the battle lines are drawn, the fight moves beyond the shop to touch on the sociopolitical values and class barriers facing the residents of the town in 1950s England.

As independent bookstores face competition from corporate giants and the arts continue to prove themselves a force of change, The Bookshop is as timely today as ever. You won’t want to miss this wistful ode to the power of a good book.

“[The Bookshop’s] subversive undercurrent, embodied in fine performances by Emily Mortimer and Bill Nighy, is what makes it really interesting.”

– Jonathan Holland,
The Hollywood Reporter