'Little Indiscreet Letters': a pleasant, if minor, British comedy about obscenity

“This is more real than it may seem,” reads a legend superimposed on the screen in the first moment of the British film

Little Indiscreet Letters.

And so it is: the bizarre story of the devout spinster who, along with other residents of the small English town of Littlehampton, began to receive insulting and obscene letters in the first post-World War II period is very true: “Dear Gladys, thank God they killed to your father, you disgusting bitch. Your place is a cave, you dirty

rabbit fuckers.

“You deserve hell, you decrepit old whore.” A letter like this would be capable of destabilizing almost anyone, but in the 1920s and in a peaceful community the matter took on police overtones.

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Both for the poster and for the extravagance of the story, the setting and that particular sense of community,

Little Indiscreet Letters

smells like an attempted revival of the wonderful 17 comedies that, between 1947 and 1955, the British production company Ealing created, with

Eight Sentences of death, Whiskey a go-go, Passport to Pimlico

and

The quintet of death

as flagships of a style based on eccentricity, a gently anarchist mood and the alteration of order and social status. However, it does not reach them. Thea Sharrock as director lacks staging details with which to enhance situations with enormous possibilities, and screenwriter Jonny Sweet cannot quite find a tone that, a century after the events, could have been much more daring. Both are content with composing a comedy that is pleasant for all types of audiences, and in a certain way they achieve it, trusting that their excellent cast will elevate their work to the charisma of comic classicism, but the film ends up having a much shorter run than the one that was could guess from its initial characteristics.

Olivia Colman, in 'Little Indiscreet Letters'.

Olivia Colman is once again perfect as a sweet and helpless woman, capable of provoking the greatest tenderness and, in just the blink of an eye, giving a scream of rage and bringing out the harpy that her characters usually carry inside. Jessie Buckley, gangly and quarrelsome, has fun, gets drunk in pubs, swears every four words and has relations with a black man amidst the gossip of Puritanism. That is, she is a free and brave woman, out of her time. However, from the confrontation between the two, who had already coincided in the magnificent

The Dark Daughter

sharing a character at different times, not many sparks of grace and surprise emerge. Timothy Spall, as Colman's cruel father, completes a cast that, in any case, supports a work that its creators wanted to surround with feminism.

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It is the time of the suffrage movement, cited verbatim to be denigrated by the patriarchy, and Harrock, forged as a theater director, involves the story of a sorority commanded by a “female police officer,” as they were called at the time, and also black. However, despite the desire for modernization,

Little Indiscreet Letters

is a bit stale and never delves into the subtext that swarms around a case that reached the newspapers and even parliament: the hypocrisy of society. Perhaps some viewers find it worth it with the presence of its performers and how slightly pleasant the film is, but if when they leave they decide to search on platforms for a good comedy from Ealing, they will realize the (big) difference.

Little indiscreet letters

Director:

Thea Sharrock.

Starring:

Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Anjana Vasan, Timothy Spall. 

Comedy genre

. United Kingdom, 2023.

Duration:

102 minutes.

Premiere: April 5.

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