Charlotte Gray (2001)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Powerful

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

In the midst of WWII, Charlotte Gray (Cate Blanchett) falls for dashing pilot Peter Gregory. She is recruited into the secret service since she spent time in France and is fluent. When Peter is lost behind the lines, she pushes to get the courier job for the French Resistance. Only she has the ulterior motive to find her missing love. Once on french soil, she finds french communist fighter Julien Levade (Billy Crudup).This is an utterly old fashion melodrama. That has less to do with the setting or time period. It has more to do with the style and the subject matter. The romance has no time to develop and has a very superficial manufactured old romance novel feel. Other than a pretty face, there is nothing to justify the grand romance being depicted. It would probably be more compelling to have this about a family member. Cate Blanchett is a truly wonderful actress, and any positives from this movie are all due to her. There is a sense of danger but it doesn't persist. Director Gillian Armstrong has made a beautiful movie. It just doesn't have better passion or excitement.

This film is beauty incarnate. Cate is superb as an undercover courier in the war. Her beauty jumps out at you in every shot. Her beauty juxtaposed against the brutalities of war create a good balance. The acting in this film is so excellent, you virtually connect to most characters on the side of good. Billy is absolutely brilliant and dapper in this film. I felt he had the best chemistry with Cate, and it is their love story that carried the film for me. Gambon is wonderful as the grouchy old man of Billy's Julien. He was a great stabilizing force in the film for Cate's Charlotte/Dominique. Couldn't be happier with the cinematography, the plot, the perfect pacing, and the ending. The only thing that would have made it truly lovely is if the boys and Gambon's Levade had not been captured. That scene was painful to watch.

Pretty dreadful adaptation of Faulks' novel.Gillian Armstrong presents a sanitised version of the book, with much of the meat of Charlotte Gray's relationships removed. Unfortunately the story hangs off the intensity of these relationships she has - with Cannerly and Lavade in particular who are never really given screen time to develop. The acting is pretty dull, and the actors are not really helped by the witheringly dull script. Gambon does his best with what little he is given in the role of Lavade, as does Ron Cook as Mirabel, but Crudup and Blanchett are just not firing on all cylinders. Maybe this is because the story has been so acutely edited, paring away all the extraneous parts of the story but in the end offering a sequence of events that create no tension either as a thriller or a romance.My other gripe is the art direction. This looks like a made-for-TV drama, with the costumes and mis-en-scene looking fresh, clean and unused. This drama is based in the 1940s during a war, life was dirty and shabby. Armstrong and her production designer give us an unrealistic picture of wartime France and Britain.Unfortunately this is really just an average British Television Period Drama.

I have a bias to confess: I could not see too many WWII spy films, read too many Ken Follett novels, get bored by the genre or complain of familiar stories told again. Today's narratives admittedly pit a clear evil force--the Nazis--against "good guy" spies, without delving into the moral complexities that might have led a decent German to join the Nazi party or search deeply into the evils that real spies did as a matter of fact, believing the ends to justify the means. While I understand that the real history is much more morally complex, the good guy-bad guy plots in the WWII spy genre are still satisfying to some more simple side of my personality.Charlotte Gray is every bit as good as any other such film in the genre that I can recall. Admittedly, there are some ridiculous plot points (why the French fellow doesn't get shot down for yelling at the Nazis in tanks is still a mystery to me, and I thought her risking her life apparently just to write a letter to the condemned children was illogical--why not save yourself for the chance to save some other children instead?), but then what movie do I see that hasn't three or four illogical moments? I have no idea why this particular film is so despised, though I have to wonder if it is because a woman is the heroic character. I thought we'd come beyond such silliness, but lately, I've been thinking, no, there is still a lot of male anxiety about strong women, even if they are safely far away in time and place, and I suspect that has skewed the response to the movie.My strongest negative reaction to the film was the same one I have to most recent Hollywood films, and is why I never go to see one at the cinema or even buy many DVDs: the women are too thin, unhealthily thin, hideous to look at for that, and Blanchett qualifies there. This actually interrupts my suspension of disbelief: whenever I see a full-body shot of a size 0 actress, I'm diverted while I think "eat a damned sandwich! Get some eating disorders therapy!" My awareness of the health crisis that this aesthetic is precipitating in our young women always detracts from my enjoyment of movies after that fact. Additionally, it isn't correct historically. Beauty in the 1940's was not stick-thinness, it was a size 10 full-busted woman.