2008 Woodie Awards
London can take it: "Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day"
By: Steve Sedlak
Issue date: 3/28/08 Section: The Arts
As London braces herself in the shadow of the oncoming menace of the Battle of Britain, Miss Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) loses her governess job and finds herself wandering the dank streets of the city as a bum. Denied further employment by her agency due to a tenuous track record, she snatches the business card of a possible employer off the desk of her boss and heads back out into the streets. She arrives at the apartment of Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams) and walks into what will be a 24-hour-long employment full of surprises. Miss Pettigrew finds out that her employer is a promiscuous starlet who believes wholeheartedly in playing the game of love. At first, Pettigrew is horrified. Then, she ends up puffing on a cigar to save her seemingly immoral employer's butt (and ends up being pretty much the pimpingest middle-aged woman in a bob I've ever seen on celluloid).
In the end, the reviews I had read that called "Miss Pettigrew" a screwball comedy revival really missed the mark. Yes, Delysia Lafosse is a goofball like Claudette Cobert's character in "It Happened One Night" or Katharine Hepburn in "Bringing Up Baby," but the parallels pretty much stop there. There is more melodrama here than there could ever be in a real screwball comedy.
Now this might be sacrilege to say, but I found more parallels between "Miss Pettigrew" and Jean Renoir's "The Rules of the Game." The audience gets a chance to spend an evening with a bunch of rich people acting ridiculous at parties and philandering about. The same theme seems to be present in "Miss Pettigrew," but the story is a little more driven in terms of its narrative, and there are certain goals that we expect Pettigrew and Lafosse to achieve by the end of the movie. It's also less of a scathing social satire on the French upper crust.
Even though the film does little in terms of cinematic style at first glance, everything reeks deliciously of the early 1940s in the world of "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day." The camera is continuously tracking, so much that when it decides to stop for a moment it's a breath of fresh air. A computer animated sequence of planes flying above London at daytime ruins the relatively realistic world produced within the film with an awkward tilting up from the balcony of Lafosse's apartment to an obviously computer generated roof and sky. But throughout "Pettigrew," Bharat Nalluri, a British director whose primary medium is television, employed what I'd like to call "remedial deep focus" in his staging of scenes. This sets up another parallel to "Rules," a film renowned for its use of deep focus.
In the end, the reviews I had read that called "Miss Pettigrew" a screwball comedy revival really missed the mark. Yes, Delysia Lafosse is a goofball like Claudette Cobert's character in "It Happened One Night" or Katharine Hepburn in "Bringing Up Baby," but the parallels pretty much stop there. There is more melodrama here than there could ever be in a real screwball comedy.
Now this might be sacrilege to say, but I found more parallels between "Miss Pettigrew" and Jean Renoir's "The Rules of the Game." The audience gets a chance to spend an evening with a bunch of rich people acting ridiculous at parties and philandering about. The same theme seems to be present in "Miss Pettigrew," but the story is a little more driven in terms of its narrative, and there are certain goals that we expect Pettigrew and Lafosse to achieve by the end of the movie. It's also less of a scathing social satire on the French upper crust.
Even though the film does little in terms of cinematic style at first glance, everything reeks deliciously of the early 1940s in the world of "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day." The camera is continuously tracking, so much that when it decides to stop for a moment it's a breath of fresh air. A computer animated sequence of planes flying above London at daytime ruins the relatively realistic world produced within the film with an awkward tilting up from the balcony of Lafosse's apartment to an obviously computer generated roof and sky. But throughout "Pettigrew," Bharat Nalluri, a British director whose primary medium is television, employed what I'd like to call "remedial deep focus" in his staging of scenes. This sets up another parallel to "Rules," a film renowned for its use of deep focus.
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