Their Finest

Their Finest (Lone Sherfig, 2016) this a film set in the early forties in London and concerns itself with the then British film industry. Being in the middle of World War II there were of course films being made for propaganda purposes. Here we see the production of a film about the evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk in 1940. To make the film more relevant to women there is a recruitment of a female screenwriter to write the slop, as they call it, dialogue for women in most other parlances. The film does give just coverage and space to the role of women in the war and how people's perceptions changed as to what women could achieve. There is a natural humour in the film which makes the film hilarious on occasion. Some of that is due to the performances especially Gemma Arterton, Bill Nighy, Sam Claflin and Rachel Stirling, but also due to the freedom the director gave her actors. There is as well a healthy acknowledgment of the nature of living in wartime and how you can be talking to someone one minute and then they're dead the next. The film is nostalgic, but with good reason, it never really strays into sentimentality, it stays true to its intentions and to the believability of the situation, as well as keeping well within the language of film.