In a small town on the English coast, in the early 1920s, people hold their breath in the Swan household. The mail will be delivered any minute and for Edith Swan, a single woman living with her authoritarian father, that potentially means yet another anonymous letter filled with vulgarities. At his wit’s end, Mr. Swan takes the case to Constable Papperwick, accusing his neighbor Rose Gooding of being the culprit. An Irish war widow, Rose lives in cohabitation and readily uses foul language. So here she is in prison, claiming her innocence. And it’s only just beginning Wicked Little Letters (Scandalously yours), a comedy as black as the ink used in the famous missives.
The film is especially worthy of the expert compositions of Olivia Colman (The Lost Daughter / The stolen doll) and Jessie Buckley (Women Talking / What they say), both absolutely delicious, the first as a giant frog victim of letters, the second as a suspect who seems to do everything to incriminate himself.
Without forgetting policewoman Moss, who, faced with purely circumstantial evidence, decides to disobey her superior and investigate in secret.
In this regard, in one of the initial developments, Edith reveals that she and Rose were initially friends, when the latter immigrated to England with her daughter after the war. Except that with her strong character, Rose quickly came into conflict with Edith’s father, quick to dominate the latter.
The plot as such is, after all, predictable (we are miles away from the complexity of the masterpiece The crow, by Henri-Georges Clouzot, the ultimate in anonymous letters to the cinema). In this case, the film has the good idea of revealing the identity of the culprit in the middle, the question then being whether he or she will be caught.
Union of forces
In fact, the mystery itself is not what seems to interest the film. In fact, it is rather a vitriolic criticism of the morals of the time (and still of today?) which is on the menu.
Thus the director Thea Sharrock (Me Before You / Before you) repeatedly isolates her three protagonists (Edith, Rose and policewoman Moss) in the image in order to convey their social isolation. One lives under the yoke of a despotic patriarch and represses her emotions, the other is ostracized because of where she comes from and the fact that she is in a relationship with a black man, while the third is discredited within a largely male profession.
Moreover, we quickly witnessed a real solidarity among the women of the community, a solidarity in which even women who were immediately hostile to Rose took part.
On this note, during the film I was reminded of the words of director Arkasha Stevenson during our recent interview for her very different film The First Omen (The curse, the beginning). Referring to “male-dominated” environments such as religion, she noted this perverse effect:
“Women can turn against each other due to lack of autonomy and self-determination. »
And this is exactly what we are witnessing in Wicked Little Lettersbefore policewoman Moss and various local women join forces.
The result is a film that is often funny (Olivia Colman’s facial expressions are always worth the detour), but where anger emerges. The ultimate plan, which lasts on purpose, is eloquent in this regard. We see one of the characters start laughing irrepressibly: it’s comical, then uncomfortable, and finally, tragic. In short, this is a story of a poisoned pen which displays a broad smile, but casts a sharp glance at society.