Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008)

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008)

This is one time where I have nothing cute to say. This was one of the saddest movies I've seen in a long time. I haven't cried this hard since Whoopie Goldberg danced with Demi Moore and Patrick Swazye in Ghost (1990). I'm serious. This is a sad movie, but beautiful and funny. It constantly reminds us  throughout the film that WWII is about to begin and that there are only two people in the whole movie who have any idea what had happened just 20 years earlier. The ending was overwhelming especially when I realized that the title really meant she was just living for each day as it came and that particular day happened to be the day England declared war on Germany. It just brought up more emotion than I had felt for a long time. I might have felt a little more emotional since we had just watched The Edge of Love and the scenes of England at war made it all very fresh. England had just been through a terrible war but everybody except two people in the movie acted as if tragedy couldn't happen again. It's obvious who one of those characters is but I would be giving away to much to say who the other one is.

The director is from India (and pronounces his first name "Bart") and says in the commentary that he hoped people would see the drama unfold throughout the movie. He had just finished a TV documentary on the tsunami that hit SE Asia in 2006 and said his own personal experience with tragic loss helped him see what the English might have felt. He changed a detail in the original 1938 book and had the day in question be the day that England declared war in 1939 (although that day was actually a bright sunny day, according to Wikipedia). He also cast a  male character to be of an age that would mean he was probably going to be shipped off to war very soon. He  wanted to show the disregard most other people had for the impending war and the then-current Depression by creating an extravagently elegant apartment, even spending 40,000 dollars on the wallpaper for the bedroom (which got cut up after the filming).