On the last night of the last week of lockdown, after the obligatory rant about there being nothing to watch (a now nightly routine in our household, perhaps the only moment of solidarity that finds its way into the lockdown tedium), I was coerced into watching Shirley Valentine, 1989’s answer to a feminist rom-com.
Admittedly, being adapted from Willy Russell’s one-woman monologue of the same name doesn’t get Shirley Valentine off to a bad start. Rom-coms aren’t usually my thing, but Willy Russell also brought us Blood Brothers, so how bad could it be?
A fairly progressive, impressively ahead-of-its-time feminist narrative ensues, with the lonely Shirley feeling belittled by her middle-class neighbours, trapped at the side of her happy-go-lucky best friend, and humiliated and isolated by her ‘traditional’ husband, who has fallen into a miserable inertia in which he has become aggressive, unaffectionate, unemotional and boorish (and a daughter who follows very much in her father’s footsteps). Things are so dire in fact, that Shirley takes comfort in talking to her walls, the ideal metaphor for her husband’s conflation of Shirley and the domestic setting. Both comforted and trapped by the four walls that she befriends, Shirley is at first alarmed when her best friend Jane invites her on a two-week getaway to Greece. We revisit Shirley’s school days, where she is at first engaged, but mocked for being a bright, working-class girl, and outshone by middle-class peer Marjorie. Shirley is reunited with Marjorie in the present-day, and finds that, in defiance of all expectations, Marjorie has become a prostitute. This encounter allows Shirley to rediscover the self of her early school days, and she accepts Jane’s offer. Whilst in Greece, Shirley finds Costas, a kind and romantic Greek who reminds Shirley what it is to be loved.
The narrative itself occupies a niche in 1980s feminist cinema, which in itself struggled to find a happy medium between the important, but often raw and disturbing films of radical feminist groups, and the sugar-coated American comedies, who proclaimed themselves ‘feminist’ in that they all focussed on the sisterhood of a very specific, middle-class, white, conventionally ‘good-looking’ group of women. Shirley Valentine offers a profoundly different take on advancing the feminist narrative. We see ‘normal life’, in Shirley’s context, for what it actually is – gendered, repressive, monotonous, and miserable. Shirley Valentine is an expertly subtle and intelligently perceptive snapshot of normal life which tells us so much more than it first appears to about what it means to be a woman. Shirley reminds us that it is okay to be strong-willed, independent and to do things which is make us happy, a simple lesson which is often easy to forget amongst the more nuanced and complicated debates we are having about gender today. Shirley’s relatability is what makes her character so effective at conveying this message – she is a normal woman, and for all our differences we can all find something in Shirley which we can relate to. And this is no mean feat: adapted from a play which is entirely Shirley’s monologue, the film rests very heavily on Pauline Collins’ impeccable performance, in which she captures frustration, misery, unbounded joy and freedom all in equal measure.
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