Lovely and compassionate movie
If it weren't for being a little slow paced at times, I would give this a 10. Still, it is a terrific movie. Shirley Valentine is a beautiful, witty, and aging woman who starts to wear from her tiresome and dull life in Manchester, England. However, she doesn't brow beat or turn herself into an us against the world person like most Hollywood actors and actresses do in their characters. Shirley Valentine has flaws and she can poke fun of others in a funny, sensitive way. She loves her husband, but he has become a terrible bore. Her daughter is spoiled. Her neighbor is too prying. Her son is a dreamer.There are flashbacks throughout her life that are hysterical. She remembers in school that she hated this one prissy girl. She hates the class prejudice at the school that condemns her as a dimwit and troublemaker, when she knows that she is better than that. She finally runs into the prissy girl, whom she was so jealous of, and is surprised that she has become a high-class call girl, and secretly admired her for being a person who didn't just take things as they were.
She has a "feminist" friend who invites her along to Greece on holiday, only to prove that she is a fickle "ist". In her Manchester blue collar common sense wisdom, Shirley Valentine, knows people better than they know themselves. After all, "ists" are often failures and weak-willed when it comes to reality. Her "feminist" friend ends off abandoning her in pursuit of a man (whom she pretends to be bitterly angry with).
So, Shirley Valentine is all alone in beautiful Greece, until she meets a terrifically charming Greek. It turns out that he is a tourist seducer, but Valentine doesn't care. He has reawakened her passion for life. One more thing - there is a beautiful scene before Valentine leaves for Greece. Her hubby comes home and flips out when he doesn't get the dinner he wants. He ends up smashing the table, and the food ends up all over his wife's lap. However, in the end, Valentine saves her husband. It is her son that tells him what an incredible bore he has become, and how times have changed, but he hasn't. So, in the end, her husband comes to Greece to look for Valentine, and for them finally to meet on equal terms - as two aging individuals. It was this beauty in the film of not counting out one person from the equation that makes this film so winning. No one is a "bad person", but just flawed and needed to find a new look at things.
score 9/10
jeremy3 16 March 2008
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1841170/34831
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