Late in 1952, Lionel Hardcastle (Geoffrey Palmer) a young second lieutenant in training with the Middlesex Regiment meets nineteen-year-old nurse Jean Pargetter (Judi Dench). They spend three months together during which they fall in love, and then Lionel is posted to Korea. He writes to Jean immediately:
1st Battalion
The Middlesex Regiment
BFPO3
February 10th ‘53
My Darling Jean
England seems so far away
and I miss you terribly. This is
the first chance I have had to
send you my address here in
Korea.
Do write back straight away
my darling…
However, Lionel doesn’t receive a reply and he incorrectly assumes Jean wants to forget him. She never receives his letter and incorrectly assumes he wants to forget her. And so he never writes another letter to her and she never tries to find his address in Korea.
Thirty-eight years pass. Jean marries, has a daughter Judith (Moira Brooker), her husband passes away, and she opens a secretarial service Type For You. Lionel meanwhile has gone to Kenya and started a coffee plantation, married and divorced, sold the plantation and moved back to London.
He has written an autobiography about his years in Kenya, titled My Life in Kenya, however his publisher Alistair Deacon (Philip Bretherton) wants him to make some edits, so he contacts Jean’s secretarial service, and Judith, who works for her mother, becomes his secretary. He invites her out for dinner, goes to Jean’s Holland Park row house, where Judith lives with her mother, and meets Jean. They don’t recognize each other immediately but each one suspects who the other one is, and later, when they meet again in the lobby of Lionel’s hotel, it becomes clear, and they realize how young and proud and stupid they were, so long ago, when they each let the other one go.
Their story is a poignant, slightly bittersweet romantic comedy-drama about two former lovers who reunite after thirty-eight years, and try to determine if they can recapture their youthful passion and exuberance, or if it is too late. They understand that they have been given a second chance, but it is a new relationship they must create, based on their nearly forty years of life experience apart, and their bittersweet regrets of the years they missed. Their story echoes the wish many of us have later in life, that we could go back and experience again the passion and possessiveness of those first weeks and months of a love affair.
The cast is uniformly excellent, and the writing has the perfect blend of the comedy that finds itself in a variety of domestic and work-related situations, and the drama that accompanies the search for love, not only for Jean and Lionel, but for her daughter Judith, for his publisher Alistair, and for Sandy (Jenny Funnell) who begins as a young employee at the secretarial service and becomes a live-in member of the Pargetter-Hardcastle family, and, really, a second daughter to Jean and Lionel.
Labels: comedy, drama, romance, rom-com-faves
IMDb 83/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=tbd, viewers=tbd)
DVD
britbox
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