Shirley Valentine (1989)

Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Starring Pauline Collins, Tom Conti, Alison Steadman, Julia McKenzie, Bernard Hill, George Costigan, Joanna Lumley, Sylvia Sims. [R]

Film version of a one-woman play of a bored-but-cheeky English housewife named Shirley Valentine, with Collins reprising her Tony-winning role, but while it may have worked on the stage, it fails as a motion picture, opened up to include other characters, an idyllic Mykonos vacation, and so forth. Shirley addresses the camera, props, and random parts of the set at will, hoping her words will explain her listlessness, her sadness, her dissatisfaction, but she winds up turning soul-searching middle-aged female ennui into a mid-life crisis package of cutesy truisms. Feeling unloved at home, she joins a friend (Steadman) on a trip for two to Greece, and meets a passionate stranger (Conti) who’s a stifado of earthy, poetic Mediterranean clichés. So much of Collins’ wide-eyed monologues and remarks are glib, self-involved and bogus, I was almost disoriented by the periodic passages (mostly in the second half) when she manages to express an authentic and articulate emotional insight or two. As with the dialogue, it took me a long time to warm up to Collins’ performance—not awful, if unworthy of the acclaim she received for it—but compared to Conti’s dreadful efforts (and worse accent), it’s a pip. The playwright, Willy Russell, adapted his own work for the screen; he previously collaborated with director Lewis Gilbert on a different adaptation of his work: 1983’s Educating Rita.

39/100