German Cinema 1998 - "The Land Girls" Review

The Land Girls

Regie: David Leland
mit Catherine McCormack, Rachel Weisz,
Anna Friel u.a.
(GB 1997, OmU, 110 Min.)

David Leland's gentle romantic drama delves intimately into the lives of three young women serving England during World War II as members of the nearly forgotten Women's Land Army. The real Land Girls, as they were called, made up an estimable female force called to farming and domestic labors to offset the loss of men to the war effort. Leland, adapting Angela Huth's novel, has made a sweet, poignant romance with underpinnings of wartime upheaval. Set in the sodden farmlands of Dorset during the winter of 1941, the film stars Catherine McCormack, Rachel Weisz, Anna Friel and Steven Mackintosh. Wistful but not precious, »The Land Girls« takes a bit of acclimatizing, but Leland makes his leisurely pacing an attribute. The film sinks into the green, serene countryside, a place where emotions echo big.

City women Stella, Ag and Prue arrive at a tiny village train station ready to serve their country. They milk cows, tend chickens and plow hilly fields on a farm owned by John Lawrence. Stella, the oldest, wonderfully played by McCormack, is willing to lose herself in labor to fill the painful days apart from her upper-crust beau, a Royal Navy officer. For Ag, a brainy Cambridge graduate, the farm is an adventure, and for Prue, a brazen working-class hairdresser, it's an opportunity to explore.

For all three Land Girls, the most interesting wrinkle is a guy named Joe, the motorcycle-riding, mud-splattered farmer's son. Joe is the character to watch -- the gangly Mackintosh plays him with heartrending reticence but a half smile of warmth. Tied to the land and putting off going to war, Joe is a healthy man suddenly surrounded by three beautiful women. He simply can't resist the charm they bring to his middle-of-nowhere life. He knows that he should not climb into the hayloft with any of them, yet in one of the film's most endearing scenes he is nearly undone for doing so. Each woman loves Joe in her own way, and while the movie overreaches in trying to build on their relationships with him, it is ultimately romance that takes center stage. A war that has seemed remote is brought home chillingly when the farm folk witness the eerie glow of bombs dropped on an England that seems far away. And the horror arrives point-blank when a disabled German fighter crashes on a pasture where the girls are working - one of many reminders of loss that drives the film far deeper than its scenic surfaces.