Cold Comfort Farm

Stella Gibbons 1932 novella “Cold Comfort Farm”, an offbeat spoof of English “rural” literature best represented by Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex” novels is so steeped in the characters and situations of the tradition that all director John Schlesinger had to do was to point the camera and shoot. Unfortunately that seems to be pretty much what he has done. The outcome is, as Mrs Smiling (Joanna Lumley) would put it “amusing”, but one can’t help wish that Schlesinger had done a little more.

Gibbons’s story involves Flora Poste (Kate Beckinsale) a well-educated 19 year old Londoner who is left an orphan when both her parents die in the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic. Having only an annuity of one hundred pounds and an indefatigable urge desire to tidy-up other people’s lives she decides, against Mrs Smiling’s advice, to go to Sussex and live with her relatives, the Starkadders on their Cold Comfort Farm. There she finds madness, despair, religious mania, unbridled lust and a dark secret surrounding her father, Robert Poste. Just the kind of thing Flora was looking for.

Writer Malcolm Bradbury judiciously makes few changes to Gibbons’s text largely transposing the characters and their dialogue intact only expunging a few verbal rustications invented by Gibbons herself and adding a few strokes by having Flora exercise her literary ambitions. And although the film has the visual limitations of the telemovie the production design is picturesquely true to the requirements of cold comfort in this god-forsaken place that is slowly sinking into a sea of mud.

All this is very well but the film has lost some of the satirical playfulness of Gibbon’s original text and given it a more naturalistic treatment. Thus one of the issues that crosses one’s mind is how could a cosseted filly like Flora have endured the place. Kate Beckinsale doesn’t really have the force of character to explain why Flora stays, let alone how she could make headway with such a gathering of irredeemable yokels. Equally one wonders how the dryadic Elfine (Maria Miles) came to be so unlike her family. These are problems of the novel (if, that is, you regard them as problems but one wishes that the writer and director had justified these anomalies (let alone Aunt Ada Doom’s transformation at the film’s end) with a more absurdist take. And personally I could have done with fewer iterations of the “woodshed” and “There always be Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm” lines (in the novel as well for that matter). Still, for fans of Gibbons there will be much to enjoy.

 

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