Calendar Girls

Calendar Girls has been given the Danish subtitle "Det' bare kvinder" ("Just Women"), which is of course meant to evoke the comedy hit "The Full Monty", known in Danish as "Det' bare mænd". And there are indeed several similarities. First and foremost, both films are quite successful feel-good comedies with something to say.

Calendar Girls is set in the small provincial town of Knapely in Yorkshire, where the friends Chris and Annie faithfully turn up to the events of the local Women's Institute, even though they are bored out of their minds. That the audience falls asleep during a talk on broccoli 100 different ways, you can hardly blame them for...

Every year the association publishes a calendar, but since pictures of village churches do not sell well, the rebellious Chris, to the dismay of most members, proposes a calendar with artistic pictures of mature housewives - in their birthday suits. The chairwoman Marie is a fierce opponent of the idea, but gradually Chris's thinking gains ground, and a handful of women including Chris and Annie agree to be models.

The question is whether people really find middle-aged housewives sexy - naked or not. We get the answer already halfway through the film, at which point the film partly falls apart because the central idea has already been used up.

Once success is in the bag for the calendar girls, the conflicts become of a different kind. On the one hand, the women experience how the media and the advertising industry exploit them ruthlessly; on the other, there are the problems on the home front. Annie's husband John is terminally ill, while Chris has neglected her husband Rod so badly in favour of the calendar work that the marriage is creaking. Things look utterly hopeless when Annie and Chris's friendship also takes a knock.